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IGHT AND SOUND

THE INTERNATIONAL FILM QUARTERLY

FEATURES

174 In the Picture

177 The Festivals: Venice and Trieste
180 Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mepris
190 Film Clips; arkadin
206 Correspondence

FILM REVIEWS

193 8| : ERIC RHODE

193 Billy Liar: peter harcgurt

194 Nazarin: Geoffrey nowell-smith

195 Le Petit Soldat:

PETER JOHN DYER

CONTENTS

AUTUM N

208 Current Film Guide

ARTICLES

196 Freud — the Secret Passion:

ELIZABETH SUSSEX

197 Eve: John russell taylok

1963

159 The Figure in the Carpet:

PENELOPE HOUSTON

VOLUME 32 NO. 4

165 Letter from Hollywood:

COLIN YOUNG

197 The Four Days of Naples:

GEOFFREY NO WELL-SMITH

198 The Raven: peter John dyer

168 Interview with Roger Leenhardt and
Jacques Rivette: louis marcorelles

182 Flavour of Green Tea over Rice:

tom MILNE

187 Moscow Roundabout: John gillett
199 Sorcerers or Apprentices: Robert vas

198 Cleopatra: penelope Houston

BOOK REVIEWS

204 Eisenstein Drawings:

MOURA BUD8ERG

205 The Innocent Eye:

BRENDA DAVIES

ON the cover : Dirk Bogarde and James Fox in
Joseph Losey's The Servant.

SIGHT AND SOUND h an independent critical magazine sponsored and published by the British Film
Institute, It is not an organ for the expression of official British Film Institute policy; signed articles repre¬
sent the views of their authors, and not necessarily those of the Editorial Board,

Copyright © I%3 by the British Film Institute, Editorial, Publishing and Advertising Offices: British Film Institute,
8 1 Dean Street, London, w.i. (Regent 0061). Editor: Penelope Houston* Associate: Tom Milne, Design: John
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to Eastern News Distributors Inc., 255 Seventh Avenue, New York l, N.Y.

157

Penelope

TII

Houston

E j

FIGURE

II

T

TE

E

CARPET

11 ... He gives me a pleasure so rare; the sense of . . .
something or other/1

J wondered again; “The sense, pray, of what?"

“My dear man, that's just what I want you to say!"

—HENRY JAMES, The Figure in the Carpet

The summer number of the Californian magazine
Film Quarterly gives us three views of Hitchcock’s
The Birds. To Miss Pauline Kael it is “a bad picture
on every level”; to the editor, Mr. Cal ien bach, it is
“disappointing . . . made on two mistaken assumptions.”
But Mr. Andrew Sams insists that it gives us “Hitchcock
at the height of his artistic powers”; and when, to even up
the sides, we look to Mr. Peter Bogdanovich, he assures
us that if Hitchcock had never made another film, this one
alone “would place him securely among the giants of the
cinema.” In the present confused state of film criticism,
such basic disagreements should surprise no one; but the
interesting point is that the split runs right down the line
of a critical theory* And what one thinks not merely about
The Birds but about Hitchcock, and not merely about
Hitchcock but about large areas of film-making, is liable
to be influenced by what one makes of the theory involved.

It started out in France, in the middle Fifties, as the
politique des auteurs pursued by Coiners du Cinema .
Lately, largely through the vigorous proselytising efforts
of a single critic, Andrew Sarris, it has acquired natural¬
ised American status under the rather repellent title of the
auteur theory. Briefly, it divides film-makers into auteurs
(true creators) and the rest, A director who does not
qualify as an auteur may make a good film, or even a

series of good films, but this won’t necessarily help him
to cross the great divide: he will have had the luck of the
right script, the right combination of actors, or some
happy victory of circumstance over mediocrity. Once an
auteur, on the other hand, more or less always an auteur ,
To determine who is in and who is out calls for a certain
amount of systematisation, and auteur critics (Mr. Sarris,
single-handed, in Film Culture \ the Movie team here)
enjoy charting their tastes, fitting each director into his
appropriate slot in a complicated grid of talent, Cahiers,
where the whole thing started, originated the notion of
the pantheon, with its greater and lesser gods.

All this is only perhaps a systematisation of a practice
common to every critic and, one would have thought,
many filmgoers. The director’s name is, or should be, the
guarantee of some kind of personal style, some view of
the world, some specific brand of pleasure. What Cahiers
du Cinema did, almost ten years ago, was to take over a
whole new territory in the name of a principle. They broke
down the old snobbish barrier between the ‘art5 cinema
of creative effort and individuality (mostly European
directors; a few American exceptions such as Chaplin,
Welles, etc,) and the ‘commercial’ outsiders, Hitchcock,
Hawks, Preminger, they argued, had as much claim to be
regarded as individual creators, and as clear a line of
continuity running through their work, as the acknow¬
ledged textbook directors. They chose to ignore a good
deal of the actual practice of Hollywood: in particular,
they showed a quite startling ignorance of the role of the
producer. But the job they did was so valuable, and at

Opposite page: Hitchcock, with Jags, in the opening sequence of ‘The Birds*'.

159

“WAat stems to be the eraufr/e, captain?” Mildred Natwick and
Edmund Gwenn in 4 The Trouble with Harrf”.

the time so necessary, that it marks a kind of watershed in
critical attitudes.

The disagreements set in later, not with the insistence that
some directors are creative and others not, which is hardly
disputable, but with the labelling and measuring process*
A critic who doesn't subscribe to the auteur theory is not
likely to be unaware of a director’s qualities: he knows
what a Nicholas Ray or an Otto Preminger can do. But he is
likely to find the exercise of talent more erratic, more depen¬
dent on chance and circumstance and the creative luck of the
draw. He may be guilty of heresies of taste (like preferring
Laura to Advise and Consent), because he doesn’t necessarily
see a director's line of development as consistent. However
much lie may enjoy The Erg Sleep , he won't take the view that
it overshadows The Maltese Falcon because Hawks has been
hoisted to the pantheon and Huston banished. Nor will he
allow that The Big Sleep, splendid though it is, demands
discussion on entirely equal terms with, say, La Terra Trema.
* * *

This has taken us a long way from Hitchcock and The
Birds. But its not quite such a digression as it seems: Hitch¬
cock is one film-maker on whom all auteur critics, most non-
auteur critics (barbarous but convenient phrase) and almost
all filmgoers are superficially in accord. General agreement
that he is a master; and immense areas of disagreement as to
just where his mastery lies, and in which films it is most
persuasively demonstrated.

The battle effectively began in 1954, when the intimidating
phrase “Hitchcocko-Hawksien" was in the French air, and
Cahiers du Cinema brought out a special number devoted to
the Master, with articles by Chabrol (“Hitchcock devant le
mar’), Truffaut and others. “Hitchcock's teaching,” said

Chabrol, -"belongs to the realm of Ethics: his moral concep¬
tions are integrated into a metaphysic*" Jean Donmrchi wrote
a long article on the “unknown masterpiece” Under Capricorn ,
finding it “in its way as ambitious and as original as, Jet’s say,
Finnegans Wake." “It’s a remarkable film," he concluded,
“which obliges us to evoke at the same time Rousseau and
Balzac, Richardson and Edgar Allan Poe, and even sometimes
Shakespeare.” Banished completely was the conception of
Hitchcock the entertainer, the man who made thrillers
because he enjoyed the mechanics of suspense and the chase.

The little book on Hitchcock published by Eric Rohmer and
Claude Chabrol in 1957 carried the arguments a stage further*
They gave, admittedly, a warning to the uninitiated: “One
must consider Hitchcock’s work in exactly the same way as
that of some esoteric painter or poet. If the key to the system
is not always in the door, or if the very door itself is cunningly
camouflaged, this is no reason for exclaiming that there is
nothing inside." As an example of their method (not, 1 think,
an unfair one), we could quote the passage on Rear Window.
Its significance, they argue, “cannot be grasped without a
positive reference to Christian dogma. And moreover three
quotations from the Gospel, inserted in the text, invite us to
look at it in this way. Jansenist and Augustinian , , , this fable
denounces not only the libido sciendi, still easier to identify in
that ti is provoked here, as in Genesis, by a woman's curiosity,
but what the Fathers of the Church called the delectatio
morosa. On to the idea of physical solitude is grafted that of
moral solitude, conceived as a punishment for this hypertrophy
of desire." We have moved (or, rather, they have moved) so
far from the conventional way of thinking about Hitchcock
that when Jean Douchet comes to write about him (again in
Cahiers ) he has almost to apologise for reverting to the old
theme of suspense. “One knows how little attention the
Hitchcock enthusiasts pay to suspense; the admission that
suspense is at the basis of his appeal will surprise them." But
all remains well: “terror and fear" are only “the emanations
of his religious thinking.” The suspense itself is 'Tattente d'une
ante prise entre deux forces occ idles, F Ombre et la LumiereF

At the outset, the 1954 issue of Cahiers carried a dissenting
note by Andre Bazin, who seemed to see himself as a sad
Canute holding back the flood, and two distinctly disillusion*
ing interviews, one conducted by Chabrol and Truffaut and
one by Bazin himself. To Bazin, Hitchcock said that he
wanted his films to achieve a particular blend of drama and
comedy, and consequently found The Lady Vanishes one of his
most satisfying movies. He also argued, persuasively enough,
that there was a greater margin of freedom in the English
studios, precisely because they lacked Hollywood’s commercial
intelligence. To quote Bazin, quoting Hitchcock: “In Holly¬
wood films are made for women, and it’s in line with their
sentimental tastes that one constructs scenarios. In England
films are made for men, and that's why they never make any
money.”

Although Hitchcock is one of the most professionally arti¬
culate of film-makers, and an expert in the difficult art of being
interviewed, these early encounters with Cahiers hardly read
like a meeting of true minds. Everyone, of course, was more
naive then. “Of all your films," they said, “our favourites are
Under Capricorn and / Confess " Answer: “I find them too
serious." (In this special context, it is almost as though
Bresson, interrogated on Pickpocket, confessed to finding it
a little lacking in joie de viyre.) What is the deepest logic of
your films, comes the question ? Answer ; “To pul the audience
through it.” Hitchcock was willing to agree with his question¬
ers that his American films outclassed the English ones— but
they remained suspicious, since only a few weeks previously he
had said more or less the opposite to a group of English repor¬
ters. Truffaut, in the 1954 issue, was constrained to work out
a theory that Hitch was something of a liar.

One's overall impression, from these interviews, must be
that le metaphysique de Hitchcock came to the Master himself
as a complete surprise, if not an actual shock. And, almost a

160

decade later, the differences of interpretation remain. One of
the Movie writers found traces of tragedy in Psycho. Hitch¬
cock’s own comment when interviewed recently by the
magazine: “It was made with quite a sense of fun on my
part . . * It's rather like taking the audience through the
haunted house at the fairground. After all, it stands to reason
that if one were seriously doing the Psycho story it would be
a case history/' There’s another revealing exchange in this
interview, when the Movie interrogators asked Hitchcock if he
hadn't recently “got much less interested in the mystery
thriller element, much more interested in broadening things
out.” The answer: “Well, l think it’s natural tendency to be
less superficial, ihafs Truffaut's opinion — he's been examining
alt these films . And he feels that the American period is much
stronger than the English period . . (my italics).

The point of these quotations is not to show up either
Hitchcock or his interviewers. Part of the critic’s job is
precisely to trace that continuing thread, Henry James’
“figure in the carpet”, of whose presence in his work the
creative artist may remain unaware. Creation is, up to a point,
an intuitive process, and the artist may have no very clear idea
as to why he always chooses a certain answer to a technical
problem (or, for that matter, a moral one) until the critic
points it out to him. One argument developed by Chabrol and
Rohmer certainly holds water: the celebrated theory of the
“transference of guilt,” whereby one character, acting in
intended or accidental complicity with another, assumes his
crimes or his criminal desires as his own. This is most evident
in a work such as Strangers on a Train , where the whole plot
premise hinges on a crime committed by one person on behalf
of another, or in / Confess ; where the murderer absolves him¬
self by his act of confession and makes the priest an accom¬
plice in his crime, or The Wrong Man , where the false accusa¬
tion loads an intolerable burden of guilt not on the man accused
but on his wife. But it can be traced, equally, through Rear Win¬
dow (the argument that the crippled photographer, by willing
something to happen, preferably criminal, as it were creates
the crime he watches), or through Vertigo or even Psycho,

Here, again, the difference of opinion is less over what
happens than over how and why it happens and how signifi¬
cant it is. The hazard of theory, and particularly of the Eureka
sort of theory in which one discovery (Hitchcock is a Catholic ;
therefore , . .) explains all the rest, is the ease with which
anything and everything can be assimilated to fit. Even the
bicycle which one of the priests is always wheeling indoors in
l Confess , and which at one moment topples over, is found
disquieting by Chabrol, who asks us to consider what makes it
fall. Nothing is more seductive to the critic than the temptation
to find some grand design in an artist’s work, particularly if
no one has noticed it before. But critical discipline properly
demands the most scrupulous examination of one’s own
theories, to test the point at which original thought shades into
dreamy fantasy.

Also, in the cinema particularly, there is the persistent urge
to fill the pantheon with true gods. If Hitchcock “only” makes
thrillers, does he really deserve his place up there with Bresson
and Bunuel and Mizoguchi ? But if behind the thrillers we are
seeing eternity in a blaze of light, then his place must he as sure
as anyone’s. To quote Chabrol (1954) again: “I and some of
my colleagues have discovered in your work a carefully
concealed theme, which is that of the search for God. What
do you feel about this?” Hitchcock: “Search for good. Oh,
yes. There is a search for good.” Chabrol: “Not good. God
himself!” Hitchcock: “God! A search for God! Maybe, but
it is unconscious * *

* + *

What interests Hitchcock? Not precisely character: he
creates it, and his flair for casting sustains it, but it is character
directed to the ends of a limited dramatic situation, star
personality cut to size. Not, certainly, professional crime, the
mechanics of a bank robbery or the operations of a spy ring.

“Strangers on a Train": Robert Walker demonstrates the an of
strangling; Norma Varden submits, and Patricia Hitchcock observes.

Professionalism hints at routine, and Hitchcock’s is the art
of the unexpected — a celebration of that jarring moment
when, walking in the dark down a staircase which you know
every foot of the way, you suddenly hit bottom one step too
soon. When Hitchcock talks of his own technique, it i? often in
terms of a deliberate avoidance of cliche. If a man is lured to
an attempted assassination, tradition demands a dark street,
footsteps in the night. So Hitchcock, in North by Northwest ,
chose the widest stretch of country at his disposal and filmed
a classic sequence built on a series of incongruities. A bare
prairie, in long shot, with a road running as straight as a ruler;
the hero standing alone at the bus stop, out of place in his city
clothes; a car jolting down a side track; a man getting out;
a shot of their confrontation, facing each other across the road
like two opponents in a Western gunfight; then a snatch of
conversation, establishing that the stranger is only a stranger
and hinting at the real source of danger; then solitude again,
and the silence broken by the sudden attack of the crop¬
dusting plane, spraying the ground with machine-gun bullets.

The Trouble with Harry, a comedy so happily amoral that
even enthusiasts for le metaphysique de Hitchcock can find in it
hardly a thread of esoteric content, is entirely constructed on
incongruities. Deliberately, Hitchcock juxtaposes his most
exquisite setting, the red-gold autumn woods of Vermont,
with his central object, the troublesomely dead Harry, care¬
fully filmed so that it’s his smart blue and red socks that
dominate the scene. Half a dozen shots of blazing foliage
precede the first moment of action, when a small boy with a
toy gun stumbles upon Harry in his clearing. And from then
on the corpse is viewed with urbane malice, as an obstacle to
be fallen over, lugged around, buried and dug up again.
Everyone in the film is much more interested in his own affairs
than in Harry; so, come to that, is Hitchcock.

16t

Keeping watch on o murderer: Gra:i Kefly and Raymond Burr in
“Rear Window

Here, too, we get one of those small, carefully planned
spoofs on the audience which reveal the way his mind works.
It is established that a cupboard door in Jennifer’s (Shirley
MacLaine’s) house refuses to stay shut. When the sheriff
arrives to question his suspects, who have Harry hidden on the
premises, the young artist (John Forsythe) is discovered
leaning against the door. Clearly something incriminating is
hidden in the cupboard; clearly Forsythe is going to move
away and the door will fly open. He does; it does — and there
is nothing there. A Hitchcock joke, like the collapsing bicycle
in / Confess, or the nun with the high-heeled shoes in The Lady
Vanishes ; or the tennis match shot in Strangers on a Train,
with all the heads turning to follow the ball, and the one
stationary figure in their midst.

These are images of Hitchcock’s cinema: creations of a
mind which enjoys above everything incongruity, surprise, the
quirk ish bypaths of human behaviour. Rich and capricious
old women stub out their cigarettes in jars of cold cream
( Rebecca ) or congealing fried eggs {To Catch a Thief) ; a
respectable lady, coming upon an equally respectable gentle¬
man tugging a corpse along by its heels, finds nothing more
to say than a civil, “What seems to be the trouble, captain?”;
a spy, holding up a man at the point of a gun, is summoned by
his wife to lunch. Being a Hitchcock wife (and Helen Haye at
that), she doesn’t bat an eyelid.

Hitchcock’s humour is thoroughly English, derived from
very reputable literary sources (the Stevenson of The Dyna¬
miter, perhaps even Wilkie Collins) and already slightly old-
fashioned, The joke makes its own point: try to treat it as a
symbol, probe it for inner meaning, and its effortless humour
falls apart in your hands. One of his most attractive and least
valued English films, Young and Innocent, contains a scene in
which a man on the run has to join in a children’s birthday
party. Anyone could get this far: the Hitchcock extra is the
fugitive’s bold effort to pass off some hideous piece of junk
statuary, purloined from the garden, as his birthday offering.
And this, precisely, is the sort of irrelevance^ which his English

films managed to accommodate, and which got lost in the
more commercial logic of his early Hollywood movies.

Here comes the critical parting of the ways. The critics of
Cahiersdu Cinema, and those who have followed them, see the
English period as no more than a prelude to the greater glories
of Notorious > Under Capricorn and 1 Confess. Where the most
direct comparison can be made, between the 1934 and 1956
versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much , they have no doubts
at all. To Chabrol and Rohmer, the 1956 film is “one of those
in which the Hitchcock mythology finds its purest expression.”
Doris Day’s scream at the Albert Hall, which deflects the
assassin’s aim, is a moment of exquisite splendour, expressing
“the revolt of sensibility against the cold logic of la machina¬
tion.” Ian Cameron, writing in Movie , finds a less transcen¬
dental satisfaction. “The obsession with motherhood is the
most conspicuous facet of Hitchcock’s concern with the ideal
of the family ... In The Man Who Knew Too Much . . . he
shows the importance he attaches to the family by centering
his film on a family that has been broken up.”

Yet, obstinately, one’s preference for the original version
survives. In 1934 Hitchcock filmed a fast-moving thriller; a
man on holiday in Switzerland gets to hear that an assassina¬
tion is being planned in London; his child is kidnapped to
prevent him talking; along with a pleasant, bumbling relation
(survival of the Watson tradition) he gets on the trail. Climax
at the Albert Hall; second climax cribbed from the Sidney
Street siege, with mother (Edna Best), who happens to be a
crack shot, picking off the villain as he hauls her child over
the roof tops. Along the way, we had such virtuoso incidents
as the murder of the secret agent (Pierre Fresnay) during a
dance, the bullet thudding through the window and the hands
pointing at the hole in the glass; or that ravishing moment, in
the chapel somewhere down in Limehouse, when the old pew¬
opening person tugs a revolver from her oilcloth shopping bag,

Hitchcock could afford to take some things for granted: not
least that mothers whose children have been kidnapped will
feel a certain natural distress. The short scene in which uncle
and father play with the missing Betty’s toy train would strike
some chord in his English, middle-class audience. By 1956, the
first location has moved from Switzerland to Morocco, and
it is a good forty minutes before we come to the kidnapping.
The time is not ill-spent; but neither, to my mind, is it very
well-spent. (Mr. Cameron argues that we get to see how
likeable the characters are, and consequently to feel for them.
Awkward, though, if one still finds Edna Best and Leslie
Banks more likeable.) f can’t but feel that this long introduc¬
tion is precisely what one might have expected at that moment
in Hollywood history, when the pressure was on to exploit
both stars and locations. And when we do get to London, the
new settings (taxidermist’s works; back street chapel; Iron
Curtain embassy) can t compare with the old. The Albert Hall
sequence perhaps benefits from both the time and the tech¬
nical resources Hitchcock could bring to it; but it seems a
strategic blunder to follow it immediately with an anti-
climactic suspense sequence organised on the same principle
of waiting for something to happen. As a thriller, the new film
really isn’t a patch on the old one. But can’t we see, we may
be asked, that it’s so much more than a thriller , . .?

* * *

Hitchcock’s films during the last twelve years or so, the
period since Strangers on a Train , can be divided into the
thrillers and the rest, films more or less ambitious. The Trouble
with Harry , that conversation piece and divertissement, stands
apart. One needn’t linger over Dial M for Murder , a precision
adaptation of a clockwork murder plot, or To Catch a Thief
with its car chases along the Cornichc, picnic lunches and
smart, sun-tanned crime. And The Man Who Knew Too Much
belongs to my mind along with the thrillers, despite both the
theological and the domestic arguments. North by Northwest
rounds them all up, being a film largely composed of enjoyable
reminiscences: the repeated echoes of The Thirty-Nine Steps;

162

the trick of virtually opening a film with a car chase (To Catch
a Thief); the heroine’s ambiguous situation (Notorious). It is
done with the utmost bravura, confidence and good humour,
and looks like a movie scripted to order around its locations.
Scenes for fanciers of Hitchcock humour: the hotel-breaking
episode, with the hero’s mother as reluctant accomplice; the
confusion of railway porters at the Chicago station; and Cary
Grant’s wild effort to get himself arrested at the auction,
which again depends on a disturbance of the civilised equili¬
brium. Jean Douchet has a theory that the hero, as an
advertising man, has to sell products, and that in assuming the
identity of Kaplan, the non-existent secret service agent, “he
becomes the product himself,” C'est magmfique; mais ce n'est
pas fa critique f

These are the “mere” thrillers, the films in which Hitchcock
is relaxed and the audience pleasurably excited and enter¬
tained, neither involved in emotional complexities nor brought
to the edge of their seats with apprehension. Strangers on a
Train , which marks the first stage in his long association with
the cameraman Robert Burks, and the only script collabora¬
tion in his entire career with a top-flight thriller writer,
Raymond Chandler, is something different. The film has a
brilliant, menacing glitter, a diamond hardness; and it
contains at least two classic anthology pieces, in the sequence
of cross-cutting between the tennis match and the murderer’s
efforts to recover the lost cigarette lighter, and the entire
episode of the murder on the fun-fair island. One critical point,
however, may be worth making. Certainly the film entirely
supports the “transference of guilt” theory, and also the other
familiar argument that Hitchcock, through his masterful
involvement of the audience, forces them into a kind of
complicity of criminal desire, a state of willing seduction by
the villain, It hasn’t, however, perhaps been quite enough
emphasised that on both points, for once, Hitchcock was
forestalled Perhaps censorship, or the need for a hero,
encouraged him to preserve Farley Granger’s innocence; but
read Patricia Highsmith’s original for the really serpentine
involvement of one mind with another.

This was neither the first nor the last of his studies in
obsession: the works in which, far from putting a man on the
run, he sets up the chase within his own mind. The four most
critically controversial films of the Fifties — / Confess , The
Wrong Man,, Rear Window and Vertigo — all share something
of this quality; as indeed, in its own way, does Psycho. The

After the bottle; Tipfii He efren and Rod Taylor in "The Birds". (This
shot, incidentally, does not appear in the finished film.)

first two remind us (though Cahiers of course needed no
reminding) of Hitchcock’s Catholic upbringing* / Confess tells
the story of a priest prevented by the secrecy of the confes¬
sional from revealing a murderer's identity, and hounded by
guilt feelings about a crime from which he benefits, and for
which he finally stands trial. In spite of a masterly use of
Quebec's weighty architecture, l find the film dull going, not
only for the reasons given by Hitchcock himself — too serious,
and wrongly cast — but because of a certain old-fashioned
mustiness about the approach, like The Ware Case with
religious trimmings. The priest (Montgomery Clift) remains
a cipher, masochist rather than saint, a man pursued not by
the hounds of heaven but by Karl Malden and the city police.

The Wrong Man takes virtually the same attitude to its
central character (Henry Fonda), the Stork Club musician
falsely suspected of leading a double life as a hold-up man*
Here, however, Hitchcock in one sequence puts the man’s
stunned passivity to superb use. The scene of Balestrero’s
imprisonment, filmed with a documentary precision which
still allows us a wholly subjective viewpoint, conveys so direct
a sense of shame, shock, and acute physical withdrawal from
the details of handcuffs and fingerprinting, that we hardly
need to be reminded of the supposedly traumatic incident when
the infant Alfred found himself locked in a police cell. Another
sequence, in the insurance office, demonstrates that total
control which allows Hitchcock to move from objective to
subjective with hardly a shift of gears. We know, on all the
evidence of the film to date, that Balestrero is a man of un¬
tarnished virtue; yet when we see him momentarily through
the eyes of the girl behind the counter, hand slowly moving to
jacket pocket, we can almost believe it will come out holding
a gun. One supposes that Hitchcock made The Wrong Man for
its opening* Tied to the events of a true story, he had to follow
it through to its conclusion in the wife’s madness — a change
of emphasis which, as subsequent interviews have confirmed,
obviously bothered him* Hitchcock deals often enough in
abnormal states of mind, but I have a feeling that he doesn’t
much care for psychiatrists, or the more technical aspects of
insanity. One feels that he’s impatient to get the wife (Vera
Miles) back on her feet again.

Obsession takes charge in Rear Window and Vertigo , fore¬
runners of Psycho in their use of the camera to break down
critical resistance, and the two films which most welcome a
Cahiers-styls interpretation. Rear Window is, of course, the
voyeur's testament: Hitchcock’s justification of his own
curiosity — and, by extension, ours. By setting himself a

Peter Lorre and Cicely Oates, the kidnappers in
t/ie original "Man Who Knew Too Much".

163

precise and exacting technical problem, that of confining the
camera’s vision to what the crippled news photographer can
see from his window, Hitchcock forces the audience to peer
with him across the courtyard. The observation is heartless,
the antics of most of the neighbours grotesque or boring*
Within the room (with Thelma Ritter as the nurse and Grace
Kelly as the perennial Hitchcock girl* blonde, rich and
voguish) the talk is shiny magazine dialogue. But the audience,
watching James Stewart watching a murderer, become in¬
extricably caught up in his obsessive curiosity* The secret (so
much of the Hitchcock secret) is the angle of vision: this time
the passive hero really is powerless to intervene, which puts
him in exactly the position of the man in the stalls.

If Rear Window involves, Vertigo hypnotises, although I
must admit it was a hypnotism 1 lesisted until resecing the film
recently. Perhaps one was put off at first by the Boileau-
Narcejac plot, of the order described by Maurice Richardson
as madman's flytrap, and depending on at least three wild
improbabilities. Rut as the detective (James Stewart) follows
the remote, pale girl he has been hired to watch; as he drives
behind her down the San Francisco streets, with the car ahead
always just slowly disappearing round another corner; as he
makes his way through the churchyard, the museum, the
decayed old boarding-house, one is drawn again into the ob¬
sessive occupation of spying on a spy, The first half of Vertigo
moves like a slow, underwater dream. The second half, with
the elaborate effort to transform the second Kim Novak back
into the first Kim Novak, has the hallucinatory quality of
nightmare. By the end of the film, the audience ought to be
as mad as James Stewart appears to be,

Psycho carries the process a stage further. In the opening
shot the camera is peering, a little furtively, beneath the half-
drawn blind of a window; and throughout the film Hitchcock
is able to play not merely on the audience's nerves (easy) but
on their curiosity. He is, as he says, “using pure cinema to
make the audience emote” — directing each reaction of the
spectators as surely as he directs the film itself* If people are
angered by Psycho , as were so many critics in this country, it
may be because they resist this direction; they don’t like the
feeling that Hitchcock has them so precisely where he wants
them. Or they may resist the insolent confidence of his humour.
One thinks of the scene in which Norman Bates stands by a
stunted tree, looking all too tike one of his own stuffed birds,
and watches the car make its faltering descent into the swamp.
Here one might be in the presence of one of Hitchcock’s
better definitions; “for me, the cinema is not a slice of life,
but a slice of cake*”

* * *

What does , then, interest this bland, smooth man? The
quirkish, English Hitchcock and the American Hitchcock who
deals in the twists and turns of the mind are not perhaps as far
apart as they seem. Humour at one end, monomania at the
other, are alike in disturbing equilibrium and order. Hitchcock
is fascinated, one deduces, by the way unreason keeps breaking
in, by the ease with which system can be overturned. But it's
the dark of the mind rather than of the soul that concerns him :
his own position is that of the rational man for whom the
world is a place of sublime and alluring unreason* A smashed
cup* however, gives him more to work with than a smashed
city; and a weakness of The Birds , his latest film, is that it
seems to be reaching out, however half-heartedly, towards
some kind of larger significance.

The opening scene is classic Hitchcock: spoiled rich girl
(Tippi Hedren; a few years ago it might have been Grace
Kelly) encounters cool, business-like young man (Rod Taylor)
in a San Francisco pet shop, (Why, incidentally, has no expert
in Hitehcock-exegesis yet produced a thesis on the fruitful
theme of his fondness for shops?) The flustered proprietress
looks on; a bird gets out of its cage; some sparring dialogue

begins to establish character. By the time the girl, Melanie, is
pursuing her young lawyer out to his home in Bodega Bay,
with the two love-birds swaying with her car as it takes the
comers, we are caught up in the old involvement.

There’s a first jabbing intimation of violence, when a seagull
zooms out of a clear sky to bang Melanie on the head. After
this, tantalisingly, Hitchcock returns to his tactic of the slow
build-up, keeping the birds waiting in the wings while he
explores the family situation of the lawyer, his possessive
mother (Jessica Tandy), all cool efficiency on the outside and
a bundle of nerves within, and his former girl friend (Suzanne
Pleshette). The situation of two girls in love with the same
young man, and the mother who doesn’t want him to marry
anyone, is only involving up to a point — correctly so, because
if we really became interested the bird invasion would simply
come as a tiresome interruption to another story.

The birds attack at a children's party; they fly down the
chimney; they murder a neighbouring farmer (Hitchcock gets
any amount of threat into a quiet shot of a row of shattered
cups on a dresser); they form up in black, sinister and orderly
rows in the school playground, while the children sing away
inside; they trap Melanie in a dive-bomber raid on a glass-
walled telephone box; and finally they hold the lawyer and his
family prisoner in their boarded up house* As all this goes on,
two things become evident* Firstly that the crows and gulls,
however well trained, must have been the very devil of a
nuisance. The slow preparations for the onslaughts (the wait
in the shuttered house; the playground scene) generally prove
much more effective than the attacks themselves, which have
to be devised in quick flurries of action, with most of the
menace coming from the electronic sound track, to cover
the fact that the birds are not really doing their stuff* Any
amount of trick work went on, including a final shot com¬
posed of 32 separate pieces of film; and the trouble is that the
film looks like it*

Secondly, the bird— people relationship remains precarious
and tenuous. Admirers have made resolute efforts to forge
links by pointing out that the mother weakens under fire while
the girl stands up to it, and someone has even claimed that
Annie, the school-teacher, gets pecked to death because she
hasn’t been properly attuned to life. (This seems a bit hard on
Annie, but no matter.) I would strongly suspect that Hitch¬
cock, a realist in most things, has got precisely the measure of
his problem. In two sequences, in the town’s cafe, he offers
us ‘explanations' from an eccentric ornithologist, a drunken
prophet of doom, and a distraught woman who blames it all
on Melanie. Here are clues for the theorists; here also is a
shrewd director tossing a few ideas around to make it apparent
that he doesn't know what the birds are up to any more than
we do.

A little obscurity, however, does wonders for a contem¬
porary film. If The Birds is really intended as a doomsday
fantasy, one can only say that it’s a lamentably inadequate
one* But why not try the birds as the Bomb; or as creatures
from the subconscious; or start from the other end, with
Tippi Hcdrcn as a witch ? One could work up a pretty theory
on any of these lines, if only one could suppress a conviction
that Hitchcock's intention was an altogether simpler one. He
scared us in Psycho, enough to make us think twice about
stopping at any building too king remotely like the Bates motel.
He tries it again in The Birds , but we will happily go on
throwing bread to the seagulls, because the film can't for long
enough at a time break through our barrier of disbelief. And
a director who has told us so often that his interest ties in the
way of doing things, not in the moral of a story, invites us to
take him at his own valuation. One stumbling block finally
stands in the way of abstractions, metaphysical or otherwise:
Hitchcock’s own intense concern for the concrete, and a
sneaking suspicion that the best critic of Hitchcock is Hitch
himself*

164

URiNG a trip to Europe last year, some of the recent
ferment in the cinema was summed up for me in a few
words by Jean Cayrol, author of Resnais' Muriel, when
he said that he and some of his colleagues were in revolt
against the films of “papa”, A simple phrase, one everyone in
Europe had heard over and over again, but not at all echoed in
Hollywood. In Hollywood no one knows there is a revolution,
so of course there are no plans for manning the barricades.

If there is a new language in the cinema (Godard, etc.) it is
certainly not being spoken in Hollywood, and when someone
comes along using it, he is not understood. The revelation of
the year has been Frank and Eleanor Perry's David and Lisa ,
a thoroughly conventional melodrama which all (except the
highbrow critics) are treating very deferentially and (most
important) are flocking to see. It is the Marty of our time and,
as in the case of its predecessor, its accomplishments are more
apparent than real. When we praised the verisimilitude of
Marty it should have been a sign to us of how far away from
reality Hollywood film-makers had moved, instead of exagger¬
ating as we did the importance of Chayefsky’s achievement in
using his peculiar brand of tape-recorder dialogue.

In a recent issue of the Journal of the Screen Producers
Guild, the suggestion is made (by an independent exhibitor)
that David and Lisa is also the Mona Lisa of our time, that it
possesses the right qualities of “simplicity”, “sensitivity” and
“appeal” (all left undefined). This in an argument in favour of

low-budget American movies aimed at the art house audience
and “dealing with our times and tugging at our emotions,” in
competition with the foreign entries. I would like to know
more about what he thinks would be saleable in such a pro¬
gramme. David and Lisa seems to get by through being
determinedly simple and touching, without having anything
to say about its characters more penetrating than the Saturday
Evening Post level of short-story writing. But even a compara¬
tively conventional first movie like Vilgot Sjoman’s The
Mistress seems vastly more relevant to the American movie¬
going public.

Part of the problem in Hollywood is a vast ignorance of
what is happening in other countries. Some of this ignorance
is wilful — as for example those who make movies themselves
(or teach others how to) but rarely go to the cinema. This may
not be a sin (Bresson stays at home), but it is a partial ex¬
planation for the resolutely old-fashioned ways of American
movies and, by inversion, for the radical formlessness of the
films made by those who do rebel, like the New American
Cinema group. But there is also a strong individualistic streak
in American film-makers, which makes them shy away from
studying the innovations of others (or even exposing them¬
selves to these innovations) on the grounds that the critical

Above: Mickey Rooney and buddy Hockett in the Stan/ep Kramer comedy

*ltrs a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World"* *

165

and the creative attitudes do not mix. The result of this is that
they do imitate, but they imitate the past instead of the present.

Ray’s Father Panchali would have been deserted by its
audience at the Screen Directors Guild some years ago if Ray
had not been there ; and some of the men who made Hollywood
the film capital of the world in the Twenties and Thirties stood
muttering angrily in the foyer after the show that it was the
work of an amateur — someone who threw images on the
screen and left the audience to work it out; someone who never
told the audience what any of the characters wanted, or
whether they ever got it. More recently, the Academy’s special
selection committee for films competing in the foreign-
language category turned down entries from France and Italy
— which happened to be Marienbad and La Notte . It is not
simply a question of thinking these films were bad, but of not
really recognising them as films at all.

* * %

The industry wants to solve its problems (a diminishing
market being chased by a decreasing number of films), but
there are grounds for thinking that they cannot do so, since
they still do not understand the problem they are facing.
Magazines such as Film Quarterly y Film Culture , the New
York Film Bulletin, critics like Dwight Macdonald {Esquire) or
Stanley Kauffmann (New Republic ), rarely affect or are even
noticed by the great figures of the movies, the Hollywood
studios, the New York banks and the Theater Owners of
America, who are howling respectively for audiences, safe
investment return and “product”, but not knowing which way
to look, or how to understand what they see.

The studios announce grandiose plans, but the same old
things are behind the window-dressing, Zanuck takes over Fox
from Spyros Skouras, hands over the studio operation to his
son, announces a new programme of films, and kicks off with
a Henry Koster production starring Sandra Dee. Universal-
International announces a plan to look for new production
talent, but those who venture too close are told that the studio
is Looking for people to put together packages. People with
a script, stars, director, budget; everything except the money,
which U-I will then arrange in exchange for distribution
rights (and 40 per cent off the top), and with studio facilities

“made available”. In other words, they run no more risk than
United Artists, and throw in their studio facilities as part of
the deal.

There is no sign that the much-touted plan for the co¬
operative, three-company venture in building one new studio
complex on the Fox ranch at Malibu is anything but a real-
estate move. In getting rid of their present studios and the
valuable land they stand on, and designing new facilities which
are more flexible and will be more frequently used, because
fewer in number, the studios would merely be tightening their
belts over a three-quarters empty stomach. There is no hint yet
that they might be considering the formation of a giant
common corporation, which would be big enough and strong
enough to take risks with the kind of diversified programme
iecommended so optimistically by Richard Dyer MacCann in
his book Hollywood in Transition , A more likely effect of the
announcement will be a sudden rush of speculators buying up
the residential land around the Fox ranch. There is always an
angle, and rarely does it have much to do with the movies.

The fallacy of the Universal-International approach is that
it is trying to blood the industry, or more narrowly its own
flock, while proceeding in an entirely conventional manner.
I do not mean by this that they are offering production
support only to established directors or producers using
established stars. But they still seem to be making the basic
assumption that the project will first of all exist as a conven¬
tional script, which can then be packaged: cast, costumed (at
least on paper), “broken down” and budgeted. There is a story
about an American actor working with Rossellini, and
telephoning his psychiatrist in the United States every night
for solace, because he was not accustomed to working with a
director who did not give him, days in advance, solid and
well-rounded lines to study and memorise. The way of Godard,
of Rossellini, of Cassavetes, is impossible in Hollywood. The
director’s cinema remains virtually unknown and unwanted,
except by the newcomers whom U-I and the other studios are
turning down. Even a courageous producer like Stanley
Kramer will have more success in farming out low-budget
pictures like Pressure Point (to Hubert Cornfield) than like
A Child is Waiting (which he gave to John Cassavetes),
because in the long run, men like Cassavetes and Kramer will
not understand each other, Hitchcock, for all his finesse and
talent, has spoiled Hollywood, because he has shown how
it is possible to write everything down in advance — sketched,
plotted, designed, cast, located, costumed, and therefore
budgeted. This is what Hollywood really understands: every¬
thing else is Irresponsible, and impossible.

* * *

We might expect that a country as large as the United
States would eventually twist itself out of this barren situation
and throw up a solution — one which would permit sufficient
continuity with the Hollywood tradition to make use of its
existing reservoir of craftsmanship and technical ability, but
independent enough to permit some of the rich regional
flavours of America to come into its films. The signs are that
this will not happen. On the one hand, the studios wifi
continue to expect projects to be conventional enough at the
planning stage to be safely evaluated for commercial potential.
At the same time, they will expect them to be magically trans¬
formed during production into a “new wave”, simply because
the budgets arc low and the faces are new. On the other hand,
if the question is “Can the United States develop regional film
centres?”, the answer (with the exception of New York)
appears to be, depressingly, no — or at least not yet. All
attempts so far to set up independent productions outside New
York on the same basis of subscriptions and limited partner¬
ship used for David and Lisa, The Connection , The Cool World ,
have failed, whether the attempt has been made in Hollywood,

Janet Margolin and Keir Dullea in “David and Lisa".

166

San Francisco, Seattle, or elsewhere. Part of this is due to
stricter partnership laws in the West (victims of land frauds
for a hundred years), but part of it also stems from a conser¬
vatism in investment not peculiar to the American provinces.

One trouble is that ail of the United States, at present, is
provincial* New York, Washington D*C., Los Angeles,
Chicago and San Francisco are all provincial with respect to
each other. This is an American phenomenon, difficult to
understand from Europe, which is accustomed to the central¬
isation of art and politics in the nations' capitals, America,
effectively, has no capital; and the effects of artistic change,
felt immediately and intensely in Europe, are softened and
blunted in America by the single fact of dispersion* We used
to say that Hollywood was not helped by being 3,000 miles
away from the theatre centre in Broadway— but this was in
the days when the New York stage was healthy* Now, with
regionalism in the American theatre and with the establish¬
ment of strong repertory theatres — for instance in M inneapolis
(Tyrone Guthrie), in San Francisco (Herb Blau) and Seattle
(Stuart Vaughn)— there is always the possibility that some of
this will get through to the movies.

The independent exhibitor quoted at the beginning of this
letter is at least on the right lines when he asks for low budget
American films made on American subjects, since an increasing
number of Americans appear to be staying away from
American movies (but seeing British and French and Italian
ones) because they can no longer accept the unreality of the
Hollywood film. “The trouble with Hollywood is its distance
from reality; from the people Americans know and can
identify with/* These were the words not of a film critic but
of a Seattle boiler-maker encountered in a national forest in
the south of Washington State. It was part of a Long tirade
that poured out when he heard where I was from* Later,
during a visit to Seattle, I found the same feeling in an
audience which had discovered it might not always care very
much for the alternatives provided by the New American
Cinema group, and wondered if this meant it was wrong to
hope that from somewhere America would get back into
American films*

For people like this, and there must be many of them, Hud
will be an exception, for at least it sets out to examine a part
of American life and society that is usually mythified by
Hollywood. But again the film-makers may have misjudged
their audience. Hud’s gesture of defiance at the end, as he
slams through the screen door in search of a beer -the Texan
version of the 4V* sign— is more sympathetic to a large part of
the audience than Ritl or his scriptwriters probably bargained
for. Ralph Nelson’s Lilies of the Field , on the other hand, with
its cute little story of an itinerant Negro handyman (Sidney
Poitier) who is bamboozkd by a group of refugee nuns into
building them a chapel in the desert, is going to offend as many
Americans as it charms. It is simply too gooey and sweet, too
much the Hollywood version of what film-makers imagine
audiences want. Thus everybody in Lilies is lovable (even
characters whom, by alt rights, we should dislike); and
Poitier, charming though he is, has an impossible job carrying
the film. And yet the United Artists press release on this movie
describes it as violating the “play it safe” principles of domestic
film-making, following none of the “safe” formulas of casting,
production or story values. It is hard to believe that they
believe it* But they do, and soon it will be listed along with
Marty and David and Lisa as an example of what Hollywood
can do when it really tries.

+ * *

The only alternatives are the blockbusters like Cleopatra
and It's a Mad , Mad, Mad , Mad World. No one has emerged
well from the Cleopatra story. Undoubtedly the worst off,
after the audience, is Walter Wanger, who leaves the impres¬
sion in his astonishing self-portrait, My Life with Cleopatra ,
that he had no real creative function on the film and was allowed
to contribute little towards its administration — even though it

Sidney Poitier in “Lilies of the Field”,

was a project of his own company. Wanger’s book has
had a suit laid against it by Skouras, but Wanger himself
is its principal victim. Coyly dedicating it to his daughters,
“who once asked what a producer does,” he then proceeds to
take away whatever respect we had left for the old-fashioned
studio system* Nick Confines (Once Upon a Sunday), who
worked for a while on the production as assistant to Ray
Kellogg, the special effects man, has made a one-reel satire on
the epic called Fremihe, using material shot at the opening
night in Hollywood,

Fellini, in New York recently for the opening of Eight ami
a Half (which is going to make Hollywood green with envy),
was asked if he had any plans for working there. He replied
that he had made many mistakes in his life and probably
would make some more — but that wasn’t one of them* But
some people are no longer there who might like to be.
Skouras is not the only famous casualty, Joseph Vogel,
saddled with the responsibility for the comparative failure of
Mutiny on the Bounty, was eased out of the top studio position
at Metro and then from the Board of Directors. The day after
he left the studio someone called in for him, and the switch¬
board girl replied, “Mr. Vogel is no longer associated with
Metro-G old wyn-Mayer. . , * No— I can’t tell you where you
might reach him.” These girls, like their colleagues at the
Thalberg reception desk, always so severe with the casual
caller, are just as merciless with the great when they have
fallen.

It is all very sad, and Stanley Kramer’s laugh-a-tninute,
3-hour 40-minute Mad , Mad World probably will not make
us fed much better. Nor does it help much to remember how
things used to be — although the Wolper production (for
television) of The Fabulous Era, made up of clips from films
of the Thirties and candid shots of the stars and directors,
does at least make us nostalgic for Busby Berkeley* Once the
Hollywood Museum is established and is showing these films
every day of the year, some of it may rub off, but meanwhile
the traditions are being maintained only for lack of anything
to take their place* And the gloss has long since gone. Not
only Marilyn is dead.

167

During the current year the French cinema
has been going through a crisis. Economically
life has been difficult, with few of the opportuni¬
ties for young directors that existed only three or four
years ago; in terms of ideas, critics are concerned to
revalue the achievements of the New Wave. Roger
Leenhardt and Jacques Rivette are both critics and
film-makers, men of different generations (Leenhardt
is 60, Rivette 35), who represent respectively the
pre-war critical tradition, founded on literature, and
the post-war innovations of Cahiers du Cinema . The
gap, however, is not all that considerable. Cahiers, in
its special issue of last December, described Leen¬
hardt as "the spiritual father of the New Wave" and
the critic who formulated the principles of the new
cinema.

Born in Montpellier, Leenhardt has been both
critic and film-maker since the early Thirties. He has
written for Esprit, Let tres Francoises, V Ecran Franqais ,

Cahiers du Cinema. “Once every ten years,” to quote
Cahiers again, “a dazzling article reminds us that he
was the first of the film critics.” He has made upwards
of thirty short films, the earliest of them dating from
1934, but only two features: Les Demises Vacances
(1947), a nostalgic study of the end of childhood, and
Le Rendezvous de Minuit (1961), with Lilli Palmer in
a dual role. He is at present making a film for
television.

Jacques Rivette comes from Rouen, and was one
of the team of young critics writing for Cahiers ten
years or so ago, Bazin’s "young Turks" of the French
cinema. As a critic he has written for various maga¬
zines, including Arts', as a junior assistant director he
worked with both Renoir and Becker. He made three
shorts on 16mm. before directing the short story film
Le Coup du Berger (1956). Paris Nous Appartient,
winner of last year’s B.F.I. award, the Sutherland
Trophy, occupied him between 1958-60, Earlier this

168

year he directed Anna Karina on the stage, in the
play La Religieuse.

The following interview, which was tape-recorded,
has been transcribed by Michel Delahaye.

Hollywood and France

marcorelles: M. Leenhardt, how did you start out as a critic
in the Thirties, and why did you become known as such a
champion of the American cinema?

leenhardt: It wasn’t through criticism that I came to the
cinema, but the other way round. In the early Thirties — in
1933* to be exact — I was training as an editor, and used to
work on the Eclair newsreels. At the same time l was also
Involved in a whole movement of ideas which had grown up
round the magazine Esprit f but which spread much wider* and
represented an attempt by French intellectuals to come to
political, metaphysical and aesthetic grips with the*r con¬
sciences. Since I was a film technician, I found myself writing
about the cinema; and I tried to base my criticism on an
overall moral and intellectual view of life at the time, in line
with Esprit's philosophy.

As for the American cinema, T must bring up something
which probably seems ridiculously old-fashioned today: the
sound film. After a long period of evolution, the cinema had
grown into an art, a plastic art, which many people thought
had reached perfection. Then, around 1 929-30, came the
whole sound revolution, which really split the European
cinema. The best critics and film-makers all felt that sound was
a total disaster, that it would mean the end of the cinema as an
art and the beginning of a canned theatre which might satisfy
popular audiences but would effectively stifle any creative
effort. But in America, thanks to that famous Anglo-Saxon
pragmatism, there never was any real problem. Look at their
thrillers, for example, or the Westerns: there’s no break in
continuity between the later silent and the early sound films.
It was American film-making which showed us how to over¬
come the apparent incompatibility between sound and image
and so started us off on the road towards the modern cinema.
marcorelles: M, Rivette, you began as a critic some fifteen
years later* after the war. Why were you so slrongty pro-
American ?

rtvette: In 1950 we approached it from a rather different
angle, but in the end the results were much the same. At
that time, in Europe at least, the American cinema was not so
much under-estimated as actually despised. It was a kind of
critical duty to attack it, and everyone ran down Hollywood
commercialism, Hollywood banality, Hollywood imbecility.
It seemed to us — to Truffaut, Godard* myself— that this
American cinema was in fact a good deal more intelligent, and
even more intellectual, than the European cinema which was
always being held up as an example to it. We felt that all kinds
of directors, not only the recognised ‘Hollywood intellectuals’
like Mankiewicz, but the so-called commercial movie-makers
like Hawks and Hitchcock, were producing films much more
intelligent than those made in Europe by our Autant-Laras,
Delannoys and De Sicas. It may have been a subtler kind of
intelligence, because it expressed itself through style and
behaviour rather than through all the usual outward signs.
leenhardt: It’s remarkable that this anti-Hollywood feeling
in France has been so strong and so persistent. Back in 1933*
there were very few of us who had a good word for Hollywood,
And even ten years or so ago, when Cahiers du Cinema asked
twenty French directors for their opinions on the American
cinema, the almost unanimous answer was that it was rubbish.
I think that only three people — Renoir, Astruc and myself—
insisted that it was all-important.

marcorelles: Neither of you has mentioned the idea of mise
en seine, although Rivette has cited a few 'auteurs’. Was this
something you were really conscious of in theJThirties, or did

you tend much more to group films under general headings—
gangster movies, crazy comedies, and so on — without bother¬
ing too much about the director’s personal contribution?
leenhardt: Obviously, the conception of the 'auteur’ was less
precise in 1935 than in 1950. In general we saw Hollywood
films as belonging to a genre — Westerns, comedies, and so on.
But this very fact, I think, made the better critics aware of the
need for creative individuality.

The difficulty arises when you talk of *mlse en seine*. I
remember writing an article just after the war which I titled
'Down with Ford, long live Wyler V A lot of people were
surprised then at the critical approach, which was an attempt
to contrast two different conceptions of mise en scene . So I
think I can claim to have been aware of the problem from
quite an early stage. All the same, there is one point which
ought never to be foi gotten, and that is the importance of the
script,

You must remember that after the coming of sound the
scriptwriters took over a major role* which in some respects
determined the evolution of the cinema. It Happened One
Night was a key film for us* and you can’t imagine now what
a bombshell it seemed at the time. Out of nothing a genre had
suddenly been created, and we had something new and
wonderful, something the cinema had found for itself: the
American comedy. But we also wondered just who was
responsible for the miracle. Was it Capra* the director, or
Robert Riskin, the scriptwriter? Some years later I saw
another Riskin film, which he had directed himself, and I
realised that he wasn’t a creator: all the elements of his
mythology were there again in the film, but the essential thing,
the creative spark, was missing.

! believe, therefore, that individuality in the American
cinema springs from this delicate balance which links script to
mise en seine , mise en seine to script, and the current which
runs constantly from one to the other. There’s a creative
tension here which is probably the essence of cinema, and
seems bound to be a determining factor in its future develop¬
ment.

Something One Sees on the Screen

marcorelles: I suppose it was as a reaction against the
critics’ tendency to talk exclusively in terms of themes and
subjects that people pounced so wildly on the whole idea of
mise en seine .

rivette: That’s just it: a reaction. If we made such a point of
mise en seine ten years ago, this was done deliberately to
stimulate controversy and to rehabilitate the idea that cinema
is also something which one sees on the screen. But over the
last few years the conception has been so widely abused that
one is finally driven to explain exactly what one meant. It is
not simply a matter of talking about the fascination of the
image one sees on the screen, but of understanding how mise
en seine is an expression of the intelligence of the director. The
term covers, that is to say, not only the position of the camera,
but the construction of the script* the dialogue, and the
handling of the actors. Mise en seine , in fact, is simply a way
of expressing what in the other arts would be called the artist’s
vision; and a novelist’s vision obviously does not depend
solely on where he places an adjective, or how he builds a
sentence, but also on the story he is telling. When we made
claims for Preminger, or Hawks, or Hitchcock, it should have
been evident that it was their personal vision of the world we
wanted to bring-home to audiences.

But the whole conception has been abused to the point of
imbecility, and it is now used to suggest that so long as the
camera movement can be called sublime, it makes no difference
if the story ip fatuous, the dialogue idiotic and the acting
atrocious. This, it seems to me* is the exact opposite of every¬
thing we fought for under the banner of mise en seine , when
we'insisted on the importance of establishing a film's author¬
ship.

169

Family group from Roger LeenhardCs “Les Demises Vacances

there was hardly a critic worthy of the name. As soon as
critics were born and began to breed, the idea was seized on,
explained, developed,

marcorelles: Even after the war, apart from Andre Bazin and
yourself, there wasn't much more than a single magazine,
VEcran Fran cats.

rivette: But VEcran Francois did exist, over and above the
fact that Bazin, Astruc and Leenhardt wrote for it from time
to time* The very fact that here was a periodical, appearing
each week, which at least tried to bring critical judgment to
bear on all the films shown, helped to create a climate of
opinion* You could say the same of Cahiers du Cinema. The
magazine is open to criticism* God knows* But by the very fact
that it has appeared every month for the last ten years it has
created a whole generation of filmgoers in love with the cinema
(drunk with it, one might say today). This would never have
happened if Cahiers du Cinema hadn't existed*

Now things have gone a stage further. There is a much
larger audience with critical awareness, and this has resulted
in the formation of little chapels of opinion which hate each
other and then love each other again, which survive just a few
months before splintering off and reforming in new alignments*
One may find it a bit juvenile, but at least it’s evidence of
a passionate concern with the cinema which would have been
inconceivable ten years ago* In 1950, Truffaut, Godard and I,
and a few others, met at the Cinematheque. We became friends
simply because there was no one else: we were the only people
who went there every evening.

leenhardt : All the same, it's a curious fact that, at any rate in
the sort of American films we have been talking about, the
"author" was to all intents and purposes the producer* He set
up a production to satisfy his own tastes, chose the script and
the stars, and picked some first-class technician as direct or. And
the interesting point is that many of the producers had them¬
selves started out as writers, so that in effect the scriptwriter's
influence extended indirectly over the whole production.
marcorelles: I feel, though, that this idea of a personal
vision in the cinema was clearly formulated only after the war*
Tn the Thirties there was hardly the kind of passionate
championship of certain directors that one finds today.
leenhardt: There's one important factor which certainly has
quite a bit to do with it. How much criticism was there in
France before the war? In 1938, to all intents and purposes,

Critics and Creators

marcorelles: M* Leenhardt, you were partly responsible,
through Bazin, for the creation of a new school of critics.
What do you feel about the state of criticism today, particularly
as it has developed out of the influence of Cahiersl
leenhardt: When someone like Claude Roy claims (writing
about literature) that creative artists make the best critics, 1
have my reservations* When an artist in full creative flower
suddenly turns a critical eye on his art it can be a valuable and
exciting experience; but I believe the function of criticism to be
analysis, and quite different from the function of creation,
which is synthesis* This is difficult ground for me, as I am
myself both critic and director * , . But I don't believe that it is
the critic's job to formulate new creative methods, and Andre
Bazin's great quality was precisely this fundamental aloofness
which allowed him to observe as a critic * The critical vision
of today affects me only in so far as I find in an article or a
review a reflection of the writer's own ambitions (in the best
sense of the word). This is one of the factors which makes this
sort of criticism alive and extremely interesting on a personal
level, but which at the same time makes the objectivity and
long-term value of its judgments very dubious*
marcorelles: Bazin's criticism was exceptional because he
was exceptional. But don't you think there might be circum¬
stances in which it was absolutely essential for a critic to be
at least a potential film-maker in order to be able fully to
understand a film? Isn't this one of the factors which might
help to explain the present crisis in criticism?
leenhardt: Was Saintc-Beuve a great literary critic? He was
wrong in about one out of three of his judgments on his
contemporaries, perhaps even two out of three. The fact is, it
seems to me, that there are two elements in criticism. On the
one hand there is its value as a piece of writing, elegantly
phrased and constructed ; on the other, its value as a judgment;
and here some critics are more often right than others, more
perceptive in discovering new paths. My quarrel with present-
day critics is that they fill neither bill. They simply do not
possess the necessary objectivity, the ability to look at a thing

Lilli Palmer and Michel Audair in “Le Rendezvous de Minuit".

170

calmly and classically, which means that in ten years time
people will be saying how right they were* Nor does their
writing have that intrinsic quality which would make it
absorbing to read, no matter how arguable their opinions.

I don’t think, when one comes down to it, that they are quite
serious enough or quite amusing enough,
rivette: To take up this point about the two different kinds of
criticism: I believe less and less that it is the critic's job to
deliver verdicts* Distinctions between major and minor works
of art are made not so much by contemporary critics as by
the artists of the next generation, who say “Of our predeces¬
sors, we recognise such and such as our masters, even if we
travel a different road from theirs. The rest can be relegated to
history.” I believe this is a law which has been proved by the
history of art, and proved again by the history of the cinema.
Take a classic case. It was the early twentieth century painters,
and not Cezanne’s contemporary critics, who claimed that he
was the greatest painter of the late nineteenth century; the
critics then followed this lead, and gave their sanction. In the
same way a positive critical contribution was made, if not by
directors at any rate by apprentice directors, who said that
Mumau was more important than Pabst, or the other film-
makers whom the historians had previously rated his equal.
And the historians have already come round to confirming
this judgment, or are in the process of doing so. In the histories
of ten or fifteen years ago, Mumau is given much the same
space as Robert Wiene. In future, Murnau will have to have
ten pages against a paragraph for Caligari (which is an
important film, all the same), plus a footnote for the rest of
Wiene’s work. Mtzoguchi, too, was in France singled out by
a few directors who recognised him as their master: critics and
historians will have to follow suit.

leenhardt: You are confusing criticism with creativity. It's
natural for a young director to try to discover himself through
his work and his ambitions, and to try to find his place in the
world in relation to his seniors. But this has nothing to do with
the critical assessment of art, which must try to find an absolute
standard by which it can measure the works that are going to
last against the ones that won't,

rivette: Yes, but what I meant was that this function, which
is traditionally attributed to the critic, doesn’t really belong to
him at all. In any case, I believe that it is almost impossible
to pronounce a verdict on a contemporary work.
leenhardt: Criticism needs a sort of privileged ground —
parallel, as it were, to the creative terrain — from which
judgments can be made* If there has been some renewal in
criticism since the Thirties, it was because Malraux wrote his
Psychology of Art , and wrote it from the terrain (unusual at the
time) of philosophy. And this privileged ground, this parallel
terrain, cannot belong to the creative artist.
marcorelles: Do we possess all the criteria necessary to draw
up a scale of values? Do you feel, for instance, that a history
of the cinema ie practicable at present?
rivette: Yes, if one excludes the last ten years. To write the
history of these ten years would obviously be a fascinating
task, but it is equally obvious that the ctoser one comes to the
present day, the more one gets tangled up in polemic and
personal preference. Fm judging from my own experience of
reseeing at the Cinematheque the films which f first saw in 1950
or so. Murnau, Stroheim, Griffith ate still great; the un¬
important films still look unimportant. But when one comes
to films made over the last decade, I find that some which I
didn’t properly understand at the time now look remarkable,
while others which I admired seem worthless* It isn’t easy to
make an objective assessment of something that is close to
you.

For example, I saw Resnais’ Muriel a few days ago. Fm glad
I wasn’t asked for an opinion on it right away, because I have

since seen it a second time; and I realise that my opinion after
a first viewing would have been a mixture of polemic, bile and
prejudice about the sort of film I expected from Resnais* It's
difficult to absorb a new film straight away, because one
begins by superimposing the film one expected, which one
wanted to see, and even which one wanted to make oneself.
. , . All these barriers must be set aside before one can see the
film which is actually there on the screen, and only then can
one decide whether or not the director has succeeded on his
terms rather than yours, A certain distance is absolutely
essential. Spontaneous reactions are all very fine, but they tell
you more about the critic than about the film.
leenhardt: At the same time, however, I think a critic must
stake himself body and soul on his discoveries, at the risk of
looking a fool ten years later if he realises that he has backed
the wrong horse. The marvellous thing about Apollinaire, or
Cocteau, was that they managed to place a finger squarely on
the thing that really was important. Or Malraux, writing a
preface to Faulkner, saying this is important, and being
absolutely right.

An Art of Youth

marcorelles: Do you feel that there is a cause and effect
relationship between the splintering of criticism around 1955
(with the resultant deification of mise en scene by some
factions, and the deification of the actor by others) and the
confusion now reigning in the French cinema?
leenhardt: My own answer to that amounts to a confession.
I made three serious errors of judgment concerning the cinema
and its development. The first, which may appear unimportant
although I don’t myself think so, concerns the age of creation.
Every field of human activity, it is said, has its own optimum
creative age. Mathematicians and poets reach the height of
their powers while very young* Painters, on the other hand,

Anna Korina in Jacques Rivette's stage production of die
play adapted from Diderot's "La Retigieuse *\

171

like most novelists, tend to create their major works in middle
age.

Now the cinema, historically speaking, was an art of youth.
As it evolved, however, 1 thought it was becoming an art of
middle age — which didn't worry me, as it seemed to bring it
closer to the novel* This was particularly apparent in the
American cinema, where one saw the middle-aged film-makers
gaining in maturity and depth what they perhaps sacrificed in
youthful brilliance. So I was rather disconcerted by the
phenomenon of a few years ago, when youth took over the
cinema. This was a really key development, and it forced me
to reconsider some of my more general assumptions. If the
cinema is an expression of the world of youth, of the thoughts
and feelings of young men in their twenties, then it's no longer
quite the cinema I envisaged. The parallels l drew were with
the novel, but the comparison, perhaps, ought rather to be
with poetry.

The second error concerns the respective roles of the
director and the scriptwriter. It may be difficult for people now
to realise the impact made on the French cinema in the
Thirties by the arrival of a brilliant new group of writers. One
must remember that before this directors had usually written
their own scripts. Suddenly writers appeared on the scene, like
the novelist Pierre Host, the poet Jacques Prdvert, the drama¬
tist Georges Neveux, It was they, rather than Carn£ or
Duvivier, who were responsible for our pre-war cinema. They
really created it.

So, I told myself, after the war all the young writers would
probably turn into wonderful scriptwriters. But it didn’t
happen like that. The intelligent young men — Astruc, for
example — had only one idea in their heads, and that was to
climb on to a crane and get the camera moving. There followed
a complete confusion in which old hacks had to be dredged up
to write scripts, since the writers with talent were either not
interested in the cinema at alt, or else felt that they were as
well qualified as anybody else to be behind the camera. And
instead of worrying about the creative problems which telling
a story entails, they were busy thinking about what sort of
focal aperture to use.

We are not out of the woods yet. Where are the script¬
writers today? Now and again one thinks, well yes, look!,
there’s one, he’s called Marcel Moussy. And what is Moussy
doing now? He wants to be a director. There simply aren’t any
scriptwriters any more.

My third error can be summed up in a sentence which once
had a certain truth in it: the cinema is not a spectacle, is not

a public phenomenon, but a personal form of expression rather
similar to novel- writing. I thought the cinema was moving
towards something more free, more interior, in which the ideal
film would be one which one could watch alone at home,
stopping at the end of a sequence just as one might pause at
the end of a chapter in order better to understand or savour it.
We saw what looked like the disappearance of the cinema as
spectacle in favour of television, which was intimate and
personal certainly, but in a rather different way from the art
I had envisaged. Then, in self-defence against television —
which is neither one thing nor the other— the cinema was
forced back into spectacle, forced in fact to become more
spectacular than ever, while the purely personal work of art
I had in mind became increasingly a misfit, an economic
impossibility.

rivette: The whole question of the scriptwriter is closely
linked to the idiot mythology which has grown up recently
round the idea of the director as complete creator, a youthful
genius who can do anything and everything, and which has
resulted in an influx of directors of startling incompetence.

Obviously we— the Cahiers team, with Truffaut as chief
spokesman — were responsible for this myth, but we were
writing at a time when potemics, shock statements like
“anybody can make a film,” were a necessary reaction against
the rigid stratification which was then strangling the cinema.
It was a completely closed shop, in which the director spent
fifteen years moving from third assistant to second assistant,
and finally to assistant director, before getting anywhere; and
the writer worked through the same process. The reaction was
inevitably violent and uncompromising: all kinds of extreme
positions were taken up. And, since 1959 and the birth of the
New Wave, all these attitudes have been taken much too
literally.

marcorelles: It seems to me that the innovations of the New
Wave are summed up in Godard’s work, and that he stands
for the most vigorous new ideas in the cinema. Do you agree ?
rivette: It's difficult in a general discussion suddenly to turn
to individual cases ... but of all the new directors, Godard
seems to me by far the most talented. In spite of all the para¬
doxes and apparent contradictions in his work, he is a coherent
and deeply reflective artist; and it would be extremely danger¬
ous for anyone less intelligent and less sure-footed to try to
follow in his footsteps. Resnais, on the other hand, works
more through conscious calculation than intuition, and for
that reason he is probably a safer model for the embryo
director to follow. Resnais makes film-making look difficult,
the result of any amount of patience and effort — which of
course it is. Godard makes it all seem so easy. It’s a pity that
A Bout de Souffle helped to create this particular myth, which
the rest of Godard's work doesn’t really support, but which
again influences critics and would-be directors.
leenhardt: For me, Godard is without doubt the best of the
new directors. The astonishing thing about this generation is
that they suddenly just began to create cinema as though bom
to it. The previous generation — artists like Kast, Resnais,
Astruc — came to the cinema after having received their
training in literature. For them film-making was difficult.
There was a sort of tension, and they felt uneasy when faced by
assistant directors who might be much less literate than they
were themselves, but who had grown up in the atmosphere of
the studios and were completely at home there. But the new
generation seemed to have cinema right at their finger tips.
They had an ease which probably came from the fact that they
were brought up on films, just as much as on literature.
marcorelles: What about the older directors whom they
admire so much? Hitchcock, for example. M. Leenhardt, you
once said that many committed films would be forgotten

172

"Parte Nous Apparent”: Betty Schneider with jean-Luc Godard, who
p/aps a small part in ftivettete film.

Fran^oise Provost in “ Paris Nous Appartienf*.

thirty years from now, but that Hitchcock would remain just
as fresh. Do you still feel the same?

leenhardt: Yes. Just now I was lamenting the fact that mise
en scene was assuming too much importance in relation to the
script, because content counts for as much as form. Although
Sainte-Beuve once wrote that “a work of art is as good as its
style,1* it is rare for a work of literature to be valuable for its
style and nothing else, Hitchcock is a stylist, one of the few
pure stylists in the cinema, and the elegance and economy of
his camera movements are pure pleasure. I sometimes read
books for the sheer delight of their language (Racine, for
instance, whose psychology — Francois Mauriac notwithstand¬
ing — is puerile), and this is exactly how I view Hitchcock. 1 am
not particularly interested in the plastic values of cinema, but
each shot of a Hitchcock film holds me in thrall admiring its
delicate musical balance, Fm an ardent admirer of a script¬
writer’s cinema, but l have to admit that mise en scene like this
is overwhelming.

rivette: One would have to be totally blind to cinema not to
recognise Hitchcock’s complete mastery. At the same time,
though, his direction is often misleadingly praised at the
expense of script and story construction, as though it were
something existing independently. One gets the impression
that when Hitchcock is preparing a film he works out his
camera movements at the same time as his story detail,
resolving his problems of clarity and economy in both fields
simultaneously. His films are never pure visual brilliance ; they
go a lot deeper than that.

marcorelles: May we turn, finally, to the present crisis in the
French cinema?

leenhardt: Firstly, there is the fact that television has
arrived, just as it did in America and elsewhere several years
ago. Secondly, there is the fact that the cinema was for years
a privileged industry, in which everyone was making money
and it was difficult to go very far wrong. The commercial
structure of the industry has scarcely changed since the
Twenties, and there can hardly be another industry in this

position. Today the industry is no longer privileged, it has to
fight, and it isn't accustomed to fighting. Hence, the crisis.

One can no longer automatically produce films which will
automatically receive distribution and automatically cover
their costs. Some other way will have to be found, towards new
methods of distribution or perhaps new forms of cinema; and
a great deal of imaginative thinking has got to go into solving
the problem. But the crisis in itself is a normal and healthy
reaction against a long period of privilege, when the cinema
lived in a troublefree world of its own.
marcorelles: M. Rivette, what do you feel about the oppor¬
tunities for film-making at present?

rivette: At the best of times it is all a matter of luck. There is
no law of society which says that it is one’s right to make a
film, or that one may make a film. If one manages to make a
film, fine; if not, then one really has nothing to complain
about. It is normal not to make films.

leenhardt: Yes, one must be realistic about this. People often
complain about the stupidity of producers and distributors
who prevent them from making films which the public is
eagerly waiting for. ft just isn’t true. After all, the middle men
do have some knowledge of their medium „ , „

One possible solution is state subsidy, which exists already
and doesn’t work too badly. Another is television, which
eliminates all the worst problems of distribution and gives you
a ready-made audience. If a difficult film is shown in an
ordinary cinema, the public probably stays away, whereas on
television everybody sees it and it stands more chance of being
accepted. If only the television companies would agree that if s
their right, as well as their duty, to show a number of' ‘difficult1 1
films each year, within the context of their normal programmes,
they would find (so long as they didn’t show too many) that
they would go down very well, This is one way out, at least.
marcorelles; Didn’t the cinema once reach a sort of state of
grace, which it has lost today?

rivette: Yes , . , but since it is lost, it isn’t worth talking
about.

173

Peter QToo/e ond Richard burton, king and archbishop in the Ho/
Wailts production of Anouilh's "Becket'\

IN THE
PICTURE

The Power of the Circuits

penelope Houston writes. At the most recent count there were
2,429 cinemas operating in Britain, and 651 of these (26 per
cent) belonged to the Rank and ABC circuits* The percentage
itself is high; but the Rank -ABC domination of exhibition is
also a matter of the size and location of their cinemas (over
40 per cent of the total seating capacity is concentrated in
theatres owned by the two circuits) and of their power in the
London area, which alone accounts for more than a quarter
of the national box-office takings*

The above figures are taken from the Report of a sub¬
committee set up last year by the Cinematograph Films
Council, under the chairmanship of Sir Sydney Roberts, to
enquire into "structure and trading practices*" In effect, this
means that the sub-committee went into the whole question
of the Third Release, the odd man out in the general release
situation, and considered a number of complaints from
independent exhibitors and producers about the "difficulties
and disappointments encountered by those who came up
against the power of the vertical combines."

Ten years ago. Rank and ABC between them accounted for

only a third of the total seating capacity, as against 1963's
41*5 per cent, and there was more genuine competition within
the pattern of exhibition* But the combined effect of cinema
closures and product shortage has been to strengthen the hand
of the two major circuits at the expense of the rest. Any
distributor looking for an outlet for his film knows that he
hasn’t a hope of getting his money back if he is denied a
circuit release; and the chequered history of the Third Release
since its inauguration in 1959 means, as the Report states,
that “for all practical purposes there are now only two
releases." The Rank Organisation in 1961 estimated that an
average return to the distributors would be about £90,000
from a Rank release, £80,000 from ABC, and only £35/40,000
from Che Third Release* Understandably, many distributors
would rather join the queue for time on a major circuit than
take their chance with the Third.

Rank and ABC are in competition with each other at the
box-office but not in the matter of acquiring product, since
"renters, with one or two exceptions, supply to one or other
circuit atone*" Such a situation cannot but lead to widespread
complaints from independent producers (particularly those
whose films are commercially shaky, artistically adventurous,
or both) and from the independent exhibitor. The latter’s
complaint, to quote the Report, is "that he cannot buy the
goods at any price, or that when he does get them their value
has deteriorated*" A comment from the production side : “It is
very difficult to get unusual second features, however good,
shown by the circuits, because of their resistance to
novelty * *

A further and more specialised problem is that Rank and
ABC between them own 39 of the 41 cinemas in Britain
equipped for 70 mm* projection; and it appears that in this
field the ‘"barring" system (whereby one cinema cannot showr
a film until another has finished with it) operates with particular
stringency. The committee were told that if a 70mm. film is
showing in Manchester the bar extends over the whole of
Lancashire, and that a 70mm. run in Glasgow prohibits the
showing of the film anywhere else in Scotland* "An allegedly
even worse practice . * , was the attempt to prevent in¬
dependents from installing 70mm. equipment by threatening
to refuse to supply the necessary prints. In one instance, an
exhibitor said that when he asked a renter for a guarantee of
70mm* product before installing the equipment, the renter
would not give such a guarantee on the ground that a major
circuit cinema five miles away might one day wish to show
70 mm. films itself."

The problem is intensified by the gap between the earnings
of the few very successful films and the mediocre many. In the
scramble for commercially viable product, Rank and ABC are
always negotiating from strength and their competitors from
weakness* The sub-committee, while obviously alive to the
points at issue, which are set out in a very lucid document, has
made recommendations which seem for the most part tenta¬
tive. They would “welcome any effort within the industry to
reopen negotiations for the establishment of an adequate third
release," with the proviso that 'Tailing some action of this kind
the Board of Trade may wish to consider what further action
should be taken*" They would “like to see the efforts of the
independent producer and the independent exhibitor en¬
couraged"; they believe that “certain reforms are desirable
and that they should come from within the industry.” They
reject, however, a suggestion put forward in a memorandum
from the Federation of British Film Makers that the circuits
might reorganise their cinemas for booking purposes into
regional groups of not more than twenty-five.

The reasoning here throws further light on the extreme
complexity of the problem* Box-office returns, in current
circumstances, will depend to some extent on the size of the
investment; and the assurance of a circuit release acts as an
incentive to production* Drastically to reduce the bargaining
strength of the circuits— and it’s difficult to see any radical
change which would not involve this — might result in a drying

174

up of investment capital, so making the situation worse rather
than better. The central question, dearly, is how to improve
the situation for the independents without undermining that
stability which at least ensures some continuity of production.
The sub-committee's report throws a bright light on the
problem, before passing it back to the industry.

Labyrinth

derek hill writes: Tours '62, Oberhausen '63 and now Annecy '63
have come and gone; and Jan Len ica's Labyrinth, a deserved Grand
Prix winner three times over, has wound up with only an inappro¬
priate experimental award (Oberhausen) and a critics’ prize
(Annecy). Admittedly jury decisions are often an exasperating anti¬
climax to a festival, but this neglect of a major and in some ways
revolutionary work has surely damaged the high reputations which
these three shorts festivals enjoy.

Lenica has abandoned the ambiguities of Dom and the good-
natured satire of Monsieur Tite. Labyrinth uses the increasingly
familiar technique of animated steel engravings, already enthusias¬
tically explored for their comic potential by such groups as Bio¬
graphic. (The same face occurs at one point in Labyrinth and The
Plain Man's Guide 10 Advertising.) But to Lenica the intense stylisa-
tion provided by the contrast between elaborate design and neces¬
sarily limited animation does not dictate comedy. One of the
achievements of the film is its demonstration that an animated work
can range as freely through the emotions as a live-action film,

Labyrinth concerns a modern Icarus, a bowler-hatted gentleman
who flies sedately into a city by means of his hand-cranked bird
wings. For a moment he believes the city deserted, an ornate,
fin-de-siecle ghost town. But a dinosaurus skeleton plods the streets
and howls at the moon ; and the nightmare is upon him. For the city
is a reflection of any society— a reflection in which people have taken
on the appearance that best shows what they really are. Reptiles and
mutations inhabit the houses, devouring the weaker passers-by. A
girl rescued from a frock-coated lizard on human legs attacks her
rescuer and flings herself back into the creature's paws. A dithering
bird with a man’s head is enticed through a window by a gipsy whore
and the flesh picked clean from his bones. The newcomer finds
himself being scientifically measured, fingerprinted and checked by
beings anxious to ensure that he conforms to their accepted norm.
But a speck of human feeling is enough to show that he does not
belong. He endeavours to escape, but is pursued across the sky by
flying monsters who peck him to death.

Even for the Polish cinema this is a work of unique bitterness.
Indeed it is probably the blackness of its despair which accounts for
juries’ avoidance of the film. (“You can't be that pessimistic,” said
Saul Bass, a juror at Tours,) Labyrinth hovers somewhere between
Kafka country and Blake's inferno. Its dark, unfashionably self-
centred loathing of the world in which its creator finds himself is
unquestionably the most personal statement yet produced by the
animated cinema.

At Annecy, the animators1 own festival, Lenica’s film outclassed
any other entry. But among the several cartoons which did deserve
serious interest were two from Lenica’s collaborator on Once Upon
a Time and Dom, Walerian Borowczyk, who now works in Paris.
Both, improbably, are from TV series: The Concert of Mr. and Mrs .
Kabul is a splendidly grotesque account of a recital interrupted by
a lady’s fierce dismembering of her husband's body, which she then
stuffs into her piano; and My Grandmother's Encyclopaedia is an
alphabetical perambulation among still more steel engravings, used
with charm and devastating wit.

Paris N otes

LOUIS marcqrelles writes: The French cinema is currently going
through the most serious crisis in its history. Two kinds of films still
continue to draw the public; the super spectacles, and the films with
which audiences can feel easily at home — movies starring Jean
Gabin, for instance, or Italian pictures in the Hercules tradition.
Of course there’s an audience for Godard, Resnais and Antonioni,
but if you go to a provincial town you won't find them billed. The
gap could hardly be wider between the tastes of the happy few and
those of the average spectator. And to try to carry on making films
at a cost of two or three hundred thousand pounds, against the
general tendency of the industry, seems the purest economic folly.

As for the low budget films, made at a cost of £30,000 or less, can

jam Lenica* s “Labyrinth”,

they be sold? Is there enough of a market in specialised cinemas
throughout the world to ensure that this kind of film-making is
commercially viable? Even the people who run the art houses are
bound to think in business terms. And one can’t ignore the failure
of guidance from the critics, who seem incapable of discovering the
innovatory and original in cinema if someone hasn't first given them
a lead. The recent misfortunes of Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers
are an illustration of the problem.

Filmed on a small budget, as was A Bout de Souffle in the easier
atmosphere of a few years ago, Les Carabiniers takes us to an
imaginary country. The two central characters, grandly named
Ulysses and Michael Angelo, lead an existence as dismal as it is
futile. Then one day two cavalrymen come in the king’s name to
call them up for service in the army. Splendid opportunities are
dangled before them: theft, rape, adventure. Our two heroes jump
at the chance, and are at once revealed as excellent soldiers, second
to none in brawling, looting and killing. When the war ends, they go
back home with hopes of a reward. But the resistance movement has
seized power and the king is in flight. In vain UJysscs and Michael
Angelo protest that they have been tricked. They are slaughtered.

This wild theme, borrowed from an Italian playwright, is de¬
veloped by Godard without any sort of sentimental concession.
Linking titles written by Godard himself, music in the manner of
The Threepenny Opera , cut in newsreel shots of war, a constantly
chopped rhythm, prevent the spectator’s sympathies from crystallis¬
ing for or against anybody. Rarely, I feel, has a film gone so far
towards nihilism and also had so much of the quality of a personal
confession. The fact that Godard has dedicated Les Carabiniers to
Jean Vigo should shock only those who make a religion out of
commitment, But in the face of a statement of such moral emptiness,
the Paris press has almost without exception cried scandal. Un¬
happily there is still no place in the cinema for the equivalent of a
book published in a limited edition. And French criticism, alas, is
moribund,

The New Wave spirit (as we understood it four years ago) is
somewhat revived by La Derive, a film shot in Montpellier and the
surrounding countryside by Paule Delsol, a young novelist born in
Indo-China. Her subject, as she defines it: 'The portrait of a lazy,
ambitious and sentimental girl.” Jacquie, her heroine, is a girl of
about twenty, anxious to get away from home and routine, dithering
bet ween dreams of a grand amour and more material ambitions. We
leave her as we find her, embarking on yet another profitless love
affair.

La Derive is subtle, direct, striking in its construction, though open
to criticism in detail for sequences which haven’t worked or bungled
ideas. Most remarkable is the sense of sympathetic understanding
between the director and the character she’s created on the screen.
The film is honest about a character and a state of mind: a 20-year-
old girl, in a particular place at a moment in time. Is this enough,
though, to rouse the interest of the critics, when the film has no snob
appeal and can only score through its own sensitivity and intelli¬
gence? Or are we entering a period when this kind of independent

175

cinema, if it's to survive, will have to move over to 16mm., with still
lower budgets? The Grand Prix at the Sestri Levante festival of
Latin American films went to the Mexican En El Balcon Vacio * a
film running just over an hour, shot in 1 6mm. and made at a cost
of about §4,000, Would Godard have done better to make Les
Carabinlers on 1 6mm ?

Experiment in San Francisco

albert Johnson writes: The small but energetic group of San
Francisco film-makers has recently undergone a renaissance.
Berkeley, the University town across the bay, is the centre of act ivity,
and the film programmes presented by the University itself (in¬
cluding first showings of such works as Le Amiche, Paris Nous
Appartient and Los Goifos) are indicative of the growing recognition
in academic circles of the importance of international as well as
domestic works. In addition, a sort of film-makers1 club called
Canyon Cinema, launched by Ernest Callenbach, the editor of Film
Quarterly y and Bruce Baillie, a local cineaste, has enjoyed a lively
success with weekly showings of silent classics and new experi¬
mental films, Stan Brakhage, the high priest of American ‘Tree
cinema”, now lives in San Francisco, and his rather bold and often
staggeringly obscure films continue to keep the critical air aflame.
The two most consistently interesting (and undiscovered) film¬
makers in the Bay area are Bruce Baillie and William Hindle.

Baillie's first film, On Sundays (1961) was a Faulkneresque fable
about a Chinese nymphet and her sinister protector, set among half-
deserted tenements in San Francisco, a region of derelicts. Except,
perhaps, for a strong, early Von Stern bergian liking for picturesque
rubble and steam shovels (£ la Salvation Hunters ) there was a
sufficiently individual stamp on the images to ensure that even the
wasielandish atmosphere Baillie strove for never became monoto¬
nous, The Gymnasts (1962) observes the athlete-as-hero, with the
ritualistic exercises of gymnasts set to carousel music and filmed
with a sharp eye for the men's narcissistic self-absorption and
discipline. One senses an undercurrent of loneliness, and a pity for
the graceful athletes who yield to the poetry of disciplined motion,
and then retire from it in silence and resignation as they go back to
their encounters with mankind.

BaillieY films exhibit a wide range of experiment: in Mr. Hayashi
(1962) we get a documentary close-up of a gentle old Japanese-

American. In his more recent work this year, Have You Thought of
Talking to the Director, Everyman * The News No. 3 and A Hurrah for
Soldiers, a flair for satire and angry political reactions is revealed.

The atmosphere of Canyon Cinema is one of commitment and
social protest, and audiences are symbolically artistic in manner of
dress and behaviour, with an odd sense of fun and cynicism about
them all. In a mad burst of whimsy* Baillie recently pieced together
a Maria Montez film and a Rin 1 in 1 in serial, presenting it as a
hilarious feature called The Beast of Utah. Asked for a statement for
his film distributor's brochure, he offered the following: “My only
quotation from myself— we were sitting around these days talking
about the magnificent roasting duck we have in the oven. I doubt
anyone has gone to find a duck and 1 doubt there is a cook in the
kitchen.”

William Hindle, who is employed in television work for a San
Francisco station, made as his nrst independent short Pastoral d'Ltey
a masterwork of that genre which links views of nature with the
lulling flow of programmatic music. After this, a change of pace to
Experiment on Experiment (1962), a television film describing Blake
Edwards1 location shooting in San Francisco for his thriller
Experiment in Terror. Hindle’s camera captures all the turmoil,
exasperation and humour of commercial trim-making, reminding
one rather of the National Film Board's “Candid Lye” series. At
one point Blake Edwards talks glibly about movie-making, his
personality sharp, sardonic and self-assured. Later, we watch Lee
Remick rehearsing in the chaos of the Roaring 1 wenties nightclub,
surrounded by bored technicians and self-consciously glamorous
extras. Ihe observation is acute and intelligent.

Another short, a piece of fledgling documentary called The Hard
Swing (1962) has also attracted attention. A first him by 21-year-old
Michael Putnam, it describes with taste, simplicity and truth the
preparation of a seasoned stripper for her act at the President
Follies* a burlesque house in San Francisco. Slowly, rather wearily,
to the piped-in sounds of olt-coiour jokes and clanging music
on-stage, she goes through her toilette. On stage, as the camera
follows her in and out of the shadows, she becomes a ravishing
odalisque for a time; then she trudges listlessly back to her
dressing-room, where she sips tea white waiting for her next show.
The authenticity of The Hard Swing should make those who dared
to praise Gypsy hide their heads in shame. It is the best American
film on the present world of burlesque, and one believes that it wfas
always Like this: in every way it is a document.

Nonpareil

garbo revivals seem to come round every five years or so; and they
must be events which other actresses look forward to with something
less than enthusiasm. This time M-G-M did the fans particularly
proud, with the Empire given over to a prolonged late summer
season. Sceptically, they consulted the teenage augurs at advance
showings before committing themselves so heavily. Response
favourable; and the old friends— Ninotchka, Queen Christina,
Camille, etc.— were given a ceremonial unveiling. Bulletins from the
Empire reported audiences so large and enthusiastic that the
company might be encouraged, next time, to bring out some of the
films that nobody has seen in years.

The critics and columnists, dusting off the usual superlatives,
found their all too easy comparison to hand. “Garbo could have
played Cleopatra with her little finger,]' declared Mrs. Gillian*
conjuring up a rather unlikely image. “Might the Cleopatra which
so sadly eluded Miss Taylor have yielded to Garbo ?" enquired Miss
Powell, before concluding that, on the whole, it might not. Anne
Sharpley, in the Evening Standard, took a tougher line, “Nothing,”
she wrote firmly, “could be more different from the gold-encrusted
voluptuous Miss Taylor who is supposed to be the one we Ye all mad
about.” And an Evening Standard colleague, Barbara Griggs,
followed the obligatory Taylor comparison with a suggestion that
even Fox's Marilyn couldn't really stand the competition: early
Monroe films “are already tarnished by a faint period comicality.”
The critic of The Times hazarded a suggestion that perhaps Garbo
might have been slightly miscast in Camille, but followed up with
an immediate retraction. “Who, offered the alternative of being
wrong with Garbo, would choose to be right with anyone else?”
The “ominously weird appeal” (Miss Sharpley 's definition) seems to
carry a higher voltage charge then ever. Poor Monroe; poor Taylor;
poor eclipsed sirens.

Fredric March and John fmnkenheimer
on the set of “Seven Doys in MdyT

176

Detphirte Seyrig in "Murie/”.

Venice

On the evidence of the Italian films shown at Venice
during the first week, II Boom seems to be dying fast,
with directors scurrying around like hypnotised rabbits
in the triple wake of Antonioni, Rosi and a wet 1-mi Iked neo-
reaiism. At the time of writing, Rosi's own Le Maui sulla Otta
had not yet been shown, and if it lives up to the brilliance of
Salvatore Giuliano, should walk away with a good many
honours. But the official entry, Castellani’s Mare Matto, which
announced itself hopefully as "a picture of the life of a sea¬
faring folk," turned out to be a characteristically self-indulgent
specimen of latter-day neo-realism, with Lollobrigida biting
amorous pieces out of Belmondo, Belmondo overdoing his
uncouth charmer act, and everybody else screaming their
heads off interminably.

Equally characteristic was Un Tentative Sentiment ale,
shown in the opera prima section. This first film by two script¬
writers, Pasquale Festa Campanile and Massimo Franciosa,
is a love story by // Mare out of Antonioni, set in an airport
waiting room, a decorative villa and a deserted beach, littered
with lovers, enigmatic spouses and suicidal girls, as preten¬
tious as you can get, and with the most risible dialogue of the
entire Festival. Ii Terrorists, another first film directed by
Gianfranco De Bosio, at least had an intelligent script which
tackled a subject hitherto shied away from— the splitting of
the wartime Resistance into opposing groups swayed by
conflicting political interests. But in trying to emulate Rosi’s
cool mixture of documentary objectivity and aesthetic beauty,
De Bosio has only produced a choppy, turgid melodrama
which looks much like any other Resistance film.

Luckily, Brunello Rondi's II Demonio, another first film,

remained to prove that Italy still commands untapped talent.
The influence is undoubtedly Rosi again, though here
thoroughly integrated into a personal style. A curious, brilliant
film, half documentary, half Dracula , // Demonio is set in a
village in Southern Italy, and tells the factual story of an
obsessively erotic girl held to be possessed by a devil, who is
exorcised by the priest, stoned and driven out by superstitious
villagers, and finally stabbed to death by her lover after he has
carved the sign of the cross on her breast. Like Salvatore
Giuliano, the film is a sharp contrast of blacks and whites, dark
interiors and rocky landscapes, a story of violence held at
arm’s length and coolly dissected, cutting sharply away into
laconic long-shot whenever it seems likely to spill over
emotionally. With stunning confidence, Rondi juggles a
bizarre love story, documentary details of superstition, and
haunt ingly beautiful images into a unity which is at once a
reportage and an aesthetic experience.

II Demonio is a revelation which justified the whole opera
prima section, but the other first films I saw are unlikely to set
any fires alight, except perhaps the Swedish A Sunday in
September, directed by Jorn Dormer and chronicling a young
couple’s progress from courtship to divorce. Admittedly, the
film is pretentiously divided into four movements each intro¬
duced by an interminable mood sequence, with the whole set
against a cinema-viriti inquest into love; admittedly, too, the
dialogue is undistinguished, and the musical score incredibly
ugly. Nevertheless it is beautifully acted by Harriet Andersson
and Thommy Berggren, and shows an attention to detail and
an ability to project which suggest that Donner, once he sobers
up after this heady orgy, might become a name to reckon with.

1963 has been a poor year everywhere. Still, there was
Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour, to my mind a masterpiece, and

177

Dahtfcr Lem and Frank Wolff In *11 Demonio".

Resnais1 most intricate examination of the structures of
memory, Resnais himself evidently feels that Muriel should be
more readily understood than the ambiguities of Marienbad
(or* as the Unifrance handout endearingly mistyped it,
41 Resnais a vouht que son nouveau film fut (Tune ecriture plus
Visible* que Je president” : so much for your literary pretensions,
Mong£n£ral): nevertheless, Muriel is so richly counterpointed
visually that it is difficult to seize, let alone write about, after
a single viewing. Suffice it to say here that Dclphine Seyrig is
remarkable as the woman who summons her lover of twenty
years ago in order to recapture the taste of love; and that
Resnais uses colour to cast a nostalgic aura of the picture-
postcard and underline his theme of the elusiveness of
memory* Every element contributes to the atmosphere of
instability and deception: the heroine runs an antique shop
from her home, where everything is for sale; a passionate
gambler, she submits herself nightly to the vagaries of chance;
the action takes place in Boulogne, destroyed by bombard¬
ment and since replaced by a new, strange city; and her
stepson, haunted by his military service in Algeria and by an
unhappy affair with a girl called Muriel, uses a film projector
(factory of illusions) to recall both experiences simultaneously.
Using overlapping sound, and intercutting brief extraneous
shots to hinge sequences or recall others, Resnais has made
a film which might be perhaps described as polyvisual and
polyphonic: at all events, a major work.

The new films from Kurosawa (High and Low), Kaneto
Shindo (Nmgen) and Bardem (Nunca Pasa Nada) were all
turgid and disappointing, but two other films call for comment:
Berlanga’s El Verdugo, and Jiri Weiss1 The Golden Fern .
El Verdugo is Bcrlanga’s blackest comedy and best film.
Rumour (apparently unfounded) had it that the Spanish
authorities demanded its withdrawal (the Bardem film was the
official entry). However this may be, the film provided
the Festival^ one ugly moment when a young man distributing
anti-Faseist leaflets in front of the Palazzo was violently
dragged away by vigilant police. Seen in Spanish context,
El Verdugo certainly has its inflammatory side, A young man
blithely agrees to replace his father-in-law as public execu¬
tioner because the official position will make it easier for him
to obtain a flat for bis wife and baby. All goes well until he is
finally called to an execution, and is forced to officiate. Never
again, he protests in horror. “1, too, said that, the first time,1’

the old man whispers comfortingly to the baby. Perhaps some
scenes succumb to the old sin of Latin garrulity, but there is
plenty of visual wit and flashes of devastating satire.

The Golden Fern is an attractive Czech fantasy about a
shepherd who conjures a wood-nymph from the forest, and
falls in love with her. Called away to the wars, he dallies with
a general's daughter, and performs three deeds of knight
errantry for her before the forest avenges the abandoned
nymph. Like most of Weiss1 films. The Golden Fern is mean¬
deringly heavy, but it is exquisitely shot by Bedrich Batkt
with a genuine fairy-tale charm; and the opening sequence,
where the shepherd steals the magic fern from a midnight
forest, has protecting birds which are a good deal more
alarming than HitehcockTs*

This year the Retrospectives (both excellent) were devoted
to Buster Keaton and the early Russian cinema. Thanks to the
National Film Theatre, though, Londoners can often respond
with a blase “ddja vu” to what may be untold riches to others.
The Russian programme, for instance, included films like
Shchors, Chapayev, The Last Night, Strike, Svenigora, Mother,
and We From Kronstadt , Among the newcomers l picked up
Protazanov’s bizarre constructivist fantasy, Aelita (1924), and
got lost in its Caligariesque complexities (Russian subtitles,
no commentary) which appear to involve madmen discovering
life on Mars and effecting a revolution there. The plastic
costumes and Barbara Hepworth sets of curved wooden
frames and stretched strings make it an oddity —but, I suspect,
all very dated. Kuleshov's Extraordinary Adventures of Mr.
West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924), on the other hand,
remains a fresh and delightful comedy, with considerable
contemporary application, Mr. West, living image of Harold
Lloyd in Stars and Stripes socks, smiles bravely and draws
moral strength from his wife’s photograph in the darkest
moments of his adventures among the Bolsheviks; and his
bodyguard, Jed, in stetson and woolly leggings, stoutly pursues
the malefactors, firing his six-gun from the top of a taxi and
roping motor-cyclists Tike steers. A genuinely inventive comedy
with a gentle line in satire, which affirms Kuleshov as an
important director. Then, having to leave Venice after the first
week, I sadly handed over Keaton to John Gillett.

Tom Milne

A Keaton Postscript

at the time of writing, we are only two days into the Keaton
retrospective, but already there have been numerous delights.
Apart from nine features, several early shorts are being shown
which often hint at ideas to be fully developed in the later
pictures* Thus, in The Paleface, Buster is chased by two rival
Indian tribes literally up hill and down dale, and in The Boat ,
a family excursion leads to total disaster after Buster has
fought a lengthy battle with nautical gadgets (reminiscent of
The Navigator) and concludes with the family landing on a
dark shore from their improvised lifeboat. “Where are we?1*
they ask, only to be answered by The End title.

Of the early features, neither The Three Ages nor Seven
Chances is wholly successful, as they are both burdened with
slightly plodding narratives. The former, a mild take-off on
the interlinking stories of Intolerance, is at its best in the arena
sequences (with Buster leading a dog-drawn chariot), while
the latter, after a slow beginning in which the hero learns that
he can only inherit a fortune if he finds a bride immediately*
erupts hilariously into one of the great Keaton sequences.
Pursued by a thousand white-gowned would-be brides, he
runs headlong through the city into the countryside where,
after a momentary respite, he descends a series of mountain
slopes pursued not only by the brides but by hundreds of
menacing boulders. Marvellously shot, it shows Keaton as
the supreme visual stylist of American silent ccmedy.

Of the remaining competition entries, Louis Malle’s Le Feu
Foilet has made the strongest impression, not only because it
has probably the Festival's best performance (Maurice Ronet)

178

and photography (Ghislain Cloquet) but for its unequivocal
handling of a difficult subject: a young alcoholic revisits his
friends and various haunts and then decides to kill himself,
which he does in the last shot. Adapted from a novel by the
collaborationist writer Drieu La Rochelle, Malle’s film is
never morbid for its own sake, but presents its case history
with much careful interior observation and shows that Bresson
can be a more useful influence than either Resnais or Godard.
It is Malle’s best film to date*

John Gillett

Trieste

Flying saucers were in for a bit of launching trouble at
this first Festival of Fantascienza films — at the outset, a
spiky boycott from the International Federation of Film
Producers; then a week of cloudbursts which sent would-be
travellers to Mars racing down a precipitous hill from outdoor
projections in the courtyard of the medieval castle to the
indoor auditorium at the Roman Theatre, the runners ushered
all the way by a polyglot chorus of Science Fiction * Cele¬
brities’, each with his own quibbling conception of what
constitutes an SF film, and each staunchly adamant that a
different 95 per cent of the entries simply had no business being
invited at all

Two of the new features presented — the Czech Ikaria XB 1
and the Soviet The Amphibious Man — were splendid and
imaginative films. Jindrich Polak’s Ikaria (awarded the Gold
Spaceship, ex aequo with Marker's La Jetee) is probably the
most believable and dignified science fiction made anywhere
since the war; at any rate the only film ever made in which
passengers of a space ship behave like adult, intelligent and
sophisticated beings.

Several centuries from now, when the world has united for
the peaceful exploration of space, a crew of forty men and
women are travelling towards a distant “White Star”. They
nearly crash into what had seemed to be a flying saucer, but
on closer inspection turns out to be a ghost spaceship which
had been sent up way back in 1983, a weird derelict floating
tomb inhabited by leering skeletons* There is evidence that the
passengers have wiped each other out in some sordid struggle
for power. As they leave this “relic from the century of
Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” two Ikarians are accidental
victims of some 20th-century “Tigerfun Poison Gas”.

There is much subsequent action— a pilot goes mad, rays
from a mysterious sun put them all to sleep for days— before,
finally, a baby born on board is held up to witness the dazzling
vision of the canal networks and cities of the new planet* These
incidents emerge with the full-bloodedness of a Jack London
or Conrad sea-adventure* But the strongest impression is made
not by the action but by the whole presentation of daily life
as lived on the giant ship. In Jan Zazvorka’s superb sets (quite
costly, they are now being reworked into a series of children’s
films), our crew gyre through a fascinating and complicated
routine of space gastronomy and space gymnastics, with every
few light years a space ball for which they all dress up and go
through the motions of a startling atonal twist. These passages
are trance-like, and the final effect of the oddly-clad intellec¬
tuals semi-sleepwalking through the corridors of their Hotel
Cosmos is a sort of Space Marienbad*

The Russians entered Gostjev’s The Celestial Brothers, a
documentary on launching tests and techniques, and
Kazancev-Tjerjentjev’s ingratiating The Amphibious Man, who
swam quite adroitly in waters lying somewhere between Swan
Lake and Flash Gordon , At a South American fishing port
(convincingly constructed at the Black Sea Studios — all the
signs in Spanish, except for one curious poster in English
advertising a product called “Old Foot Sores”), the pearl-
fishers are being exploited by a nasty hidalgo, Don Pedro, who
is generally viewed from a stark low angle against a large
crucifix. A poor girl named Alicia, who has been forced to
accept Don Pedro’s marriage proposal, is snatched from a
shark’s jaws by the “Marine Devil”, a creature who has been
busy scaring everyone in those parts to death. Actually, he is
the cultivated son of a gentle scientist who dreams of a
republic of the future where men shall be free and amphibious.
The boy, enamoured of Alicia, sheds scales and helm and
follows her to town, where he creates havoc by distributing
the fish, his brothers, to the poor, before being finally driven
back again to his watery life*

On paper it may look utterly idiotic, but the film is strangely
moving. Shimmering colour photography and subtle filter-
work are fine fairy-tale assets; Korieniev is a sympathetic
jeune premier^ like a more virile Nureyev; the underwater
scenes are stunning, especially a dream ballet in which he
imagines Alicia also to have become a sea-devil and they go
through a fanciful underwater honeymoon. SF or not, the film
is a lyrical work which fully merited its Silver Spaceship*

(Continued on page 207)

179

Above: Brigitte Bardot, Georgia Moll* Jack Palance, against a
background of film posters. Right: Palance and Brigitte Bardot,
Below: Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Frit/: Lang (back to camera) and
Jack Palance.

Opposite page. Above: The film within a film. Michel Piccoli,
Lang, Palance and (with clapper-board) Godard. Below: Brigitte
Bardot, unfamiliar in the Karina-style black wig which she wears
for some scenes in the film.

filmed on location in Rome and Capri t
Jean-Luc Godard's latest film, Le Mepris,
based on Alberto Moravia's novel 11
Dhprezzo , is about a writer (Michel Piccoli)
working on a script for a film of The Odyssey,
who discovers that his wife (Brigitte Bardot)
despises him, and tries to come to terms
with his life through the world of Homer.
Fritz Lang makes his star acting debut, in
effect playing himself, as the director of
the film within the film, with Jack Pa lance
as his tyrannical producer, and Georgia
Moll as the producer's devoted secretary.
The camerawork, of course, is by Raoul
Coutard, in Franscope and Technicolor,

Binrn MttKOSCH rtODUCTIOHi

ODYSSEUS

omtcroK
F. LANG

R KUTARD

>1

BY TOM MILNE

_ J

FLAVOUR OF
GREEN TEA
OVER RICE

-t *

The two most obvious and unwavering characteristics of
an Ozu film are familiar enough by now; in subject-
matter, the rigid adherence to the shomin-geki genre,
dealing with the lives and domestic problems of middle-class
families; and in technique, the stationary camera fixed some
three feet above the floor and gazing unwinkingly at the
characters without benefit of such devices as fades or dissolves*
Camera angles are rare, tracking shots even rarer, pans
almost non-existent; often (Good Morning, An Autumn
Afternoon ), the camera never moves at all from one end of
the film to the other.

Ozu is frequently described, with good cause, as the most
Japanese of directors, and is at once the easiest and most
difficult to write about. Phrases like Donald Richie’s “Gzu’s
world, its stillness, its nostalgia, its hopelessness, its serenity,
its beauty . . tend to roll comfortably (even though
accurately) off the pen of a critic faced with the task of
conveying the hypnotic, deeply emotional quality of films
which all seem much the same — same sets, same stories,
same camera set-ups, same rhythm, same actors even— and
which yet retain their power to absorb even when viewed
one after another, or for a second or third time. It is a little
like looking at those endless Picasso variations on the dove,
where the simplicity of line would appear to leave little scope,
and yet the subtle new perceptions keep on coming.

Exactly how Ozu does it will probably remain his secret,
and the difficulty of analysing his work is increased by the
fact that in the West we have only been able to see a pitiful
handful of the fifty-four films which he has directed since his
debut in 1927 with Sword of Penitence (Zange no Yaiba) up
till last year’s An Autumn Afternoon (Samma no AJif To be
precise, the recent NFT season brought the total of Ozu
films seen in London to eight, and the London Festival will
add one more — none of them shown commercially. Until
the NFT season, in fact, trying to assess Ozu’s work seemed to
be rather like trying to analyse the work of a director like
Ford on the basis of the post-war Westerns, without knowing
that a few years earlier he had made films like The Grapes of
Wrath, The Long Voyage Home , Tobacco Road and They
Were Expendable , There are still huge gaps, of course, but on
the evidence of the 1932 silent film, / Was Born , But * , it
appears that Ozifs development has been remarkably
consistent, a process of refinement along a single track rather
than a series of adventures down convergent paths,

* * *

His most recent, and to my mind most masterly film, An
Autumn Afternoon , is worth fairly close analysis as it shows
his method at its most completely formal. The story, as
usual, is a simple one about a widower, Hirayama San, who
realises that it is time his daughter, who keeps house for him,
found a husband. The film keeps an even, witty keel as
Hirayama goes composedly and purposefully about his
matchmaking task, and the daughter is quite agreeable,
especially when she discovers that her proposed husband is
a young man she is already half in love with, A setback comes
when they find that this young man is already bespoken, but
another prospect is chosen, the daughter finds him acceptable,
and the marriage takes place. The film closes on a strangely
moving, almost cathartic note of mingled grief, resignation
and tranquillity when Hirayama, alone at home after his
self-sufficient younger son has gone to bed, breaks down and
weeps quietly. Apart from one deeply poignant moment when
the daughter realises she cannot marry the man she loves, the
tone of the film has hitherto been mainly light, often humorous.

occasionally ribald. Nothing, apparently* has prepared for
the emotional depth of the last scene, yet it is a perfectly
natural climax towards which the whole film has been
imperceptibly moving through a mosaic of characters and
incidents which interlock, sometimes obviously and some¬
times obliquely, to illuminate the underlying theme of
loneliness.

On the most obvious level, there is the character of 'The
Gourd”, an elderly teacher who is given a reunion dinner by
his middle-aged ex-pupils after one of them has run into him
by chance. At the dinner, the Gourd gets roaring drunk and
has a whale of a time. Hirayama is detailed to see him home,
only to discover that he no longer teaches, but runs a scruffy
noodle-shop with his unmarried daughter. Later, the Gourd
gets drunk again, and pours out his loneliness and his guilt
about his daughter, who has become a sour spinster. In
retrospect* the reunion dinner and the old man’s enjoyment of
it take on a new pathos; and Hirayama, through his pity, is
brought face to face with the future.

Similar, but more subtle, is the role played by Hirayama’s
friend, Kawei. We first meet him at the very beginning of the
film when he plants the idea of marriage in Hirayama’s mind.
Very soon after we acquire two apparently unimportant
pieces of information about him: he dislikes the Gourd, and
refuses to attend the reunion (though he does); and when
Hirayama asks him to go for a drink with another friend*
Professor Horei, he refuses as he has tickets for a baseball
game (in fact, he does go). Approximately an hour later in
the film, there is a very brief scene at Kawei’s house, when he
and Professor Horei, in revenge for an earlier joke* hoax
Hirayama into thinking that his marriage arrangements have
fallen through. Kawei’s wife overhears, and puts Hirayama
out of his misery by telling him the truth. The scene is in¬
significant in itself, and could well have taken place in the
sak6 shop where the earlier joke was perpetrated, but Ozu
obviously chose this setting because he needed to introduce
Kawei’s wife at this point. We suddenly discover that Kawei
has a charming wife and a very happy home life* and this
fact illuminates the earlier behaviour of both men. Obviously
Kawei's earlier refusal of the two invitations came because
opportunities for conviviality and conversation mean little
enough to him; and, by extension, his refusals point up
Hirayama’s eagerness to take up offers of companionship.

When, for example, he goes to the Gourd’s noodle-shop
for the second time, to deliver a gift of money, he is greeted
by a repair-shop mechanic who says that he had served under
Hirayama during the war. Although Hirayama obviously
does not recognise him, he readily accepts an invitation to
celebrate their meeting. They repair to a bar where the
loneliness theme is furthered on two levels. Firstly, in the
nostalgic talk and sing-song recalling wartime comradeship;
and second, more importantly, in the woman behind the
bar who, as the father later tells his children, looks like their
dead mother. Later still the elder son goes with his father to
the bar to examine the lady, and roundly declares that she
doesn’t look at all similar. “No,” the father agrees dreamily
and with unshaken confidence, “not if you look too closely,
but she does.” Treated lightly* and completely without
emotional stress so that one is almost unaware of their role
in the mosaic, these scenes yet add their grain to the weight
that is building up. Then there is Professor Horei, also a
widower, recently remarried to a young wife, and the object
of a barrage of ribald jokes about virility pills and dropping
dead from exhaustion— a painful question-mark about the
future. And finally, at the centre of the film, but again

Opposite page: the first five shots of "An Autumn Afternoon1’.

183

apparently connected only in a loose “family chronicle’1
sense, are the scenes involving Hirayama's married son and
his wife* Most of the time we see them they are bickering
about money which his father has given them for a new
refrigerator. They finally come to an agreement where, if he
spends some of it on golf clubs, she will buy a new handbag.
Maliciously, though affectionately, Ozu records their re¬
conciliation: they have, through all their squabbles, some¬
thing which the father unconsciously but desperately seeks —
the security and companionship of marriage.

It is difficult, without literally re-telling the entire film, to
convey the manner in which each scene is dependent on every
other scene for its meaning. Perhaps the most illuminating
comparison is with music: each sequence comes like the
entry of a new subject in a sonata, which is then developed
and counterpoised with the other themes already introduced,
Ozu, it is said, considers the preparation of the script to be
the most important part of film-making, and will spend up
to a year with his faithful collaborator, Kogo Noda, on the
elaboration of a script. Even judging mainly by the subtitles,
it is obvious that the dialogue is not only rich and probing but
capitally important, but it would be a mistake to suggest that
the script takes precedence over the mise en scene : they are,
in the fullest sense of the word, complementary.

The action of An Autumn Afternoon takes place within a
strictly limited number of settings: Hirayama's house and his
office, the son's flat, Kawei's house and office, the noodle-shop,
and four bars or restaurants (in addition there are two brief
exteriors: a railway station, and a rooftop used for golf
practice). Each scene is introduced by its own establishing
shots. The film opens, for example, with two different shots
of factory chimneys; a third shot through a window framing
the chimneys; a fourth showing an empty corridor; a fifth
showing the widower at his desk. The sixth shows a secretary
entering: Hirayama questions her about another girl who is
away getting married, and jokingly says “Your turn next”;
her reply that she has to look after her father introduces the
subject of the film.

Each time the film moves from one locale to another, the
new scene is introduced by its establishing shots, so that at
any point in the film one knows not only where one is but
where one is going to be. These establishing shots are, of
course, instantly recognisable, though they may contain minor
variations, indicating time of day (for instance, one particular
shot of the block of flats where the son lives shows washing

hanging on every balcony). A more subtle use is made of the
corridor which introduces Hirayama's home. Normally the
camera has opened up on the empty corridor, and we watch
the sliding door at the far end open to let someone enter.
The last sequence, however, after the wedding, opens with the
corridor shot, held, nobody enters; cut to the living-room
where the two sons and daughter-in-law are awaiting
Hirayama's return, and one of them says “He’s late*11 There
is no reason why anyone should have come through that
door, but the fact that it does not open adds a note of fore¬
boding to the words “He’s late/' which lingers over the final
sequence of Hirayama's grief.

But these shots seem to have another function over and
above “establishing11. They are always of inanimate objects a
corridor, a block of flats, chimneys, a pile of petrol drums, a
neon sign— and the first shot in an establishing sequence
never contains human figures (though subsequent shots may
— someone passing across the far end of the corridor, for
example)* The idea of the transience of human life is basic to
Buddhist thought: human existence is a mere drop in the
ocean of time. And herein lies, perhaps, one of the secrets of
the tranquillity, the deep reconciliation, which pervades Ozu's
work* Each of his scenes is introduced by an object, durable
and immovable; against it, his characters live out their lives,
and long after their suffering has ended, the object will
endure.

Some of Ozu’s objects, obviously, will not endure in any
strict sense, for a shop sign can be changed, a pile of petrol
drums be dispersed or pulped. But each of his establishing
shots (every shot, in fact) is composed with minute care, so
that even a row of factory chimneys, or a corridor empty
except for a tin of polish, has, in its immobility and beauty,
the essential timelessness of a work of art. And love of
beauty, in the Japanese, amounts to reverence, comparable
to their deeply-rooted reverence for nature, which finds
expression in such passionately observed activities as flower
arrangement, or changing scroll paintings on walls to
harmonise with the changing seasons, and which is probably
a tradition surviving, in a very traditional people, from the
pre-Buddhist animistic religion of Japan, ft is this which
lends to certain of Ozu’s exterior scenes a reverberation far
beyond the natural beauty of the photography or the grace of
movement of his actors: the scene in Early Autumn when the
two women kneel by the lake, for instance, or in An Autumn
Afternoon , the oddly moving iittle scene when the daughter
and the boy she loves lean against the fence on the railway
platform as they wait for a train.

Another useful pointer to Ozu’s work is the haiku . The
haiku, as every good Zen Buddhist knows, is a strict poetic
form composed of three lines, the first containing five syllables,
the second seven, and the last, five again. For example,
a haiku by the 17th century poet, Basho:

Furuike ya An old pool

Kawam tobikomu A frog jumps in

Mizu no oio The sound of water

Professor Ernst analyses the poem as follows: “A crude
expansion of the immediate images of this haiku is that the
old pool signifies permanence or perhaps the continuity of
time, while the frog jumping into the pool implies the brief
duration of life. The surface of the water is broken, the
concentric ripples agitate it, but soon the motion dies. The
brief movement of life has disappeared into the eternal
unchanging. Even this general description of the ‘meaning1
of the poem is a falsification, for its poetic effect lies not in a
precise intellectual concept but in a terse statement of
sensuous images, producing a sense of the fragmentary and
the isolated.”

"G&od Morning'*.

184

father and daughter-in-law: the /ast sequence of ‘Tokyo Story***

The application to Ozu*s work is obvious, both in the
relationship between establishing shot and subsequent scene,
and in the relationship between the scenes themselves, which,
like the images of the haiku, combine to create an interlinear
meaning. At the same time, though, the haiku illustrates
another facet of Japanese art which is particularly relevant to
Ozu^s method of mise en seine. To quote Professor Ernst
again:

Although the Japanese schools of Buddhism show wide
variations in theory, all are in general agreement about the
nature of existence. Existence consists in the interplay of a
plurality of dements whose true nature is indescribable and
whose source is unknown. Combinations of these elements
instantaneously hash into existence and instantaneously
disappear, to be succeeded by new combinations of elements
appearing in a strict causality. . « « Time is an empty concept
invented by the mind; the past has no existence because it
has ceased to be, the future is unreal because it does not
yet exist. The only concrete reality is the moment * . .
Japanese art tends always, as it does in the haiku, toward
the isolation of the single, significant, visual moment . , ,

In An Autumn Afternoon , for instance, there is a breath-
takingly beautiful moment which, in the context of a European
film, might well be a cliche of virtuosity. The daughter has just
been told that she cannot marry the man she loves; her father
knows that she is upset, and goes to her room to beg her at
least to meet the substitute, emphasising that she need not
marry him if she dislikes him. Silently she nods agreement.
Instead of photographing the two actors within a single
frame as he often does, Ozu cuts from one to the other: the
father standing, calm, kind, but imperturbably insistent; the
daughter seen first from behind, then in front, inscrutably
toying with a tape-measure as she agrees to meet the man.

As the father leaves, a final shot observes the girl from behind,
and after a moment she slowly raises a hand to tuck a stray
lock of hair into place. The gesture, surely a ‘"significant visual
moment,” vividly captures the girl’s grief and helpless isola¬
tion. More particularly, however, it is worth noting that
because there is no dissolve or fade, there is no tapering or
artificial prolongation of the emotion: it is complete in
itself. Moreover, because there is no pan from one character
to the other, the shot of each of them retains its purity:
energy (i.e. emotional content) is not drained from one to
feed the other. And the cut comes at the very last moment,
with Ozu holding the shot of the father until one feels that he
must cut to the girl; a dynamic relationship is thus created
between the shots which allows the emotional content of each
to remain quite separate, held suspended as it were, shot
against shot, scene against scene, awaiting their place in the
pattern of the whole.

* * *

Essentially, these techniques and this method of construe-
tion are at the basis of all Ozu's films, sometimes more and
sometimes less successfully used, and obviously refined
through the years to the present diamond-sharp precision (in
particular, his use of establishing shots seems to have
developed recently to an even greater formality). Ozu himself
has said that he used dissolves only once, in the 1930 Life
of an Office Worker (Kaisham Seikamt ), and that by 1932,
with / Was Born , But * . « ( Umar etc Wa Mita Keredo), he had
deliberately given up the use of the fade-in and fade-out.
Certainly in this early but astonishingly fine film — a brother
in minor key to DonskoFs Gorki trilogy — his technique is
basically very much what it is today. The main difference is

185

that I Was Born * But * , , is dearly a young man's film, and
works in a slightly different way: it is active rather than
contemplative. Compositional ly, it rarely achieves the
exquisite simplicity of the later films* One sequence, for
instance, opens with a shot of the father taking the early
morning air and exercising with chest expanders* He stands
in the garden, framed by lines of washing hung up to dry;
to the left, and in the background, the garden fence; behind
the rear fence, a road; and behind the road, a railway line
with a train passing. From the point of view of the later
Ozu, this shot can be faulted on two grounds. Firstly, that it
contains too complex a pattern of movement — the man
using the chest expanders, the washing flapping, the train
passing; and secondly, that it is too complex lineally — the
two fences, the washing lines, the road, the railway track.

The scene, in fact, is active rather than passive, and the
whole film follows suit* There is, comparatively speaking, a
good deal of camera tracking, but more striking is Ozu's
use of dynamic cutting (almost, shock cutting used for comic
purposes). For instance* after the father has discovered that
his sons have been playing truant, there is a sequence in
which he escorts them to the school gates before departing
for his own office ; the boys peer in at the gates, see the bully
waiting for them, and turn to run away* Ozu cuts sharply to
reveal the father still standing and watching sternly, then
cuts equally sharply back to the boys as they meekly wheel
about and return to the school* This editing technique is
used throughout the film, and lends it a rhythm which is
unique in his work*

Twenty-seven years later, Ozu remade, or rather re-worked,
the theme of / Was Born , But * . . in the 1959 Good Morning
(Ohayo). Comparison between the two films is particularly
interesting, as the later one reveals a distinct change of
emphasis. / Was Bornf But . . * concentrates almost entirely
on the two boys* their pains and joys as they discover society
and the difficulties it presents. As with the Gorki films, we
feel by the end that we have shared a difficult experience
with the children* who are trying to understand why their
father should have to bow obsequiously to his boss, while
they rule the boss's son with a hand of iron; and the last
sequence, when they solve their problem by admitting to the
rich child that his father is better than theirs, while forcing
him to admit that they are better than he is* is a charming
and brilliantly perceptive insight into the growth of childish

experience. The only characters of any importance in the
film, apart from the boys and their schoolfellows, are the
mother and father, and the boss*

In Good Morning the emphasis shifts from the boys to
society in general. A whole host of characters is introduced-
more parents, neighbours, a very ancient grandmother, a
pedlar* a teacher— as well as certain episodes which have
nothing to do with the boys at all (a good deal of catty
speculation, for instance, caused by the disappearance of
some Women’s Club funds). The central situation still
remains the same: in I Was Born, But , * . the boys rebel
against their parents with a hunger strike because they cannot
see why their father should kow-tow to anybody; in Good
Morning , they rebel with a silence strike because they cannot
see why they shouldn’t have a television set like everybody
else. But in Good Morning Qzu’s concern is mainly satirical*
and he uses the silence strike to spark ofT a series of malicious
sketches about “keeping up with the Joneses” and the
backbiting of neighbours who feel sure the parents have
instructed the boys not to speak to them for snob reasons.
Here Ozu is so little interested in his original and central
theme that the boys’ problems, as well as everybody else's,
are solved all too simply and impermanently when their
parents are finally driven to buy a television set* Good
Morning is extremely funny (perhaps Ozu’s funniest film),
and often brilliantly sharp in its satire, but it has no real
centre.

Failure of a more serious kind is illustrated by Early Spring
{ Soshun ), made in 1956 and the only really unsatisfactory
Ozu film I have seen. Alan Lovell has already pointed out the
similarity between Ozu and Jane Austen, and although the
comparison cannot be taken very far, it is a useful one* Like
Jane Austen, Ozu usually keeps to his “little bit of ivory”:
when he strayed from it in 1950 at his producers' request, to
introduce a romantic love interest into The Mimokata Sisters,
the result, according to Donald Richie, was one of his few
post-war flops* Although Early Spring appears to be highly
regarded in Japan, it seems to me to stray, heavily and
uninspiringly.

The subject, slightly unusual for Ozu, deals with a married
man* bored with his wife, who embarks on an unsatisfactory
affair with a free-and-easy girl; disillusioned with her, he
accepts a transfer to a provincial branch of his firm; there,
away from the bustle of Tokyo, he ponders his life, and is
eventually reconciled to a forgiving wife* The first image of
the film is one of emptiness and boredom* as the husand and
wife get up in the morning to start their day; and Ozu—
probably because the lasting communion of marriage is to
him self-evident — never bothers to demonstrate the value of
their marriage* Consequently the final reconciliation, shot
in characteristically exquisite style* seems completely
arbitrary. Several other episodes which contribute to the
husband's spiritual odyssey add their rather melodramatic
weight to the feeling that the film is overloaded on a very
slender base; the scene, reminiscent of some tormented
Russian play, when he visits a young office friend who is
dying, for instance; or when another friend talks despairingly
to him about abortion because his wife is having a baby which
he cannot afford*

Late Spring (Bans him, 1949) and Late Autumn (Akihiyori,
1961) again offer a useful contrast. Late Spring has a very
similar theme to An Autumn Afternoon — a father's decision to
marry off his only daughter — and is one of Ozu’s most
beautiful films. Late Autumn is a remake* considerably
changed, in terms of a mother and daughter, and much less
successful. As with Good Morning , many of the characters
seem arbitrarily introduced merely to make a good scene:
for example, the daughter’s pert young office colleague who

Continued on page 206

’Tate Ajtumfi”*

186

★

JOHN GILLETT

Moscow in JULY ... an oppressive heal haze hangs over the
city : inside the Hotel Moskva dozens of stars, directors
and delegates to the film festival mingle and gabble in the
sweltering foyer, whilst outside a crowd of cheerful teenagers
keeps a permanent vigil for famous faces and, in nearby Red
Square, a small army of mounted film extras rides obediently
round a small set for War and Peace , kicking up clouds of
dust in the afternoon sun.

So a little film oasis was established in the centre of Moscow
for two busy and instructive weeks, with the Palace of Con¬
gresses in the Kremlin itself as the centre of operations. As
one approached this huge shiny building, via a cobbled
pathway and some imposing arches, it looked like something
from Things to Come , especially when contrasted with the
older Kremlin landmarks: glass walls, a weird array of
escalators running from ground to ceiling, and television sets
in the vast foyer which relayed the films as they were shown.
Inside, one found an all-purpose auditorium seating about
6,000, complete with deep stage, hidden orchestra pit and
facilities for earphone translations in more than a dozen
languages, Upstairs, a ballroom-cum-refreshment centre cater¬
ed for the mainly youthful crowds who stared, persistently
but kindly, at the hundreds of foreigners in their midst.
First impressions, then: this was a festival of crowds and big
occasions and lengthy welcoming speeches and enquiring
faces anxious to seek your opinions on art, politics and life
in general. There's no doubt about it: the Russians like to be
liked.

More crowds again on the few non-film evenings: at the
Gorki Park where a lengthy open-air entertainment was given
by many of the visiting delegations — a kind of Amateur Night

with the stars, with Peter Ustinov rousing a startled audience
with his impersonation of a German music teacher, and
Italian songs from Lea Massari (guitar) and Georgia Moll
(bongos) which ended abruptly and sadly when the former
lost her plectrum. Gradually these public events also became
opportunities to seek out elusive personalities. At a grandiose
reception within the Kremlin itself, with its little ante-rooms
looking like sets from Ivan the Terrible , a gallery band inter¬
spersed the inevitable speeches with Frenchified military
marches as the hundreds of guests munched their way along
the buffet tables. And here, suddenly, one met the Soviet
cinema face to face, in the persons of Arnstam talking about
the Bach score he once arranged for a performance of Pot¬
emkin, Alexandrov describing his new version of October
incorporating material cut in the Twenties, Roshal and Ermler
reminiscing a little wistfully over their early triumphs, and
Gerasimov huddled out of earshot in a corner with a black-
coated group eating ice-cream. Finally, and best of all, Mark
Donskoi, bubbling over and gesticulating as he sent eager
greetings to his English friends.

* * *

For the Muscovites, however, this was primarily a festival
of films rather than personalities, although every delegation
was given polite applause as they made their obligatory,
formularised speeches of goodwill before entering the cere¬
monial box in the Palace. All performances, both in and out
of competition, were sold out, with a total audience of around
600,000, surely a record for any film festival. In the circum¬
stances, it was regrettable that the quality of the entries was
so low, since the festival provides the Muscovites with their
only opportunity to see a cross-section of world cinema. The
Americans, with an unusually amiable delegation including
George Stevens Jnr, Tony Curtis and Stanley Kramer, showed
Some Like It Hot , The Great Escape, West Side Story and
Judgment at Nuremberg, all of which were eagerly gulped
down by the Russians. The Wilder film, in particular, reduced
the audience to near hysterics*

Other countries seemed unwilling to take chances, and we
saw an i ndigestible selection of what may be termed * 'Moscow
subjects”! wartime resistance dramas, heroic sagas from
countries recently released from the “colonial yoke” (to use
a choice phrase delivered from the stage), and records of
workers" resistance to capitalist oppression (both the Polish
and Rumanian entries dealt with miners" strikes). Seemingly,
the pattern has not changed much over the years* East Euro¬
pean directors still possess the talent and resources to deploy
huge masses across the wide screen, yet the approach to
characterisation and dramatic construction remains, for the
most part, wholly doctrinaire, and contemporary subjects were
as usual in the minority. But if the formulas on the screen
tended to look stale after a few days, the after-screening
discussions grew in intensity. Unlike their Western counter¬
parts, the Russians never tire of airing their artistic problems.

In many respects, this has been a crucial year for Soviet
political and artistic policies. The beginning of the Moscow
Festival coincided with the climax of the Russo-Chinese dash
(the Chinese, in fact, withdrew all their films at the outset), and
the Test Ban agreement was initialled at the festival’s end. Also
in the air wfere rumours that Mr. Khrushchev's famous March
speech on the need to maintain party surveillance over the arts
(reported in the last sight and sound)* would result in
increased caution, especially on the part of the younger film¬
makers.

Accordingly, the two morning discussions presided over by
Gerasimov — whose writings on socialist realism represent the
ultimate in conformity — promised to be rich in polemics. But
after a lengthy introduction by an unsmiling Gerasimov, who

*When several of us asked if it was possible to see the film in
question, Ilyich Zastam , we were told politely that it was being
re-cut*

187

Soviet bravura: Tarkovsky's “ Childhood of Ivan",

reiterated all the familiar dogmas and then took to smoking in
a rather agitated manner, the discussion degenerated into
over-generalised harangue. Too many speakers simply
repeated the dictum that the cinema should be for humanity
and not against it, without stating with any precision just what
they meant* Others made it clear that they deemed “enter¬
tainment** to be a dirty word; a leading Soviet critic delivered
a diatribe against the "depravity of the Western" (poor old
Ford); whilst Antonioni, Resnais and the practitioners of
cinima-vdriti emerged as the modern villains. In an attempt
to gain clarification on some of these points, I jokingly asked
a group of Eastern delegates why Antonioni should not be
allowed to co-exist with, say, De Samis, that arch-priest of
commercial left-wing “realism™. Depressingly, they replied
that, although they had seen nothing by Antonioni, they felt
his work represented the decadent side of his society and
should not be encouraged. . * .

Coming shortly after these debates, the three or four new
Soviet films shown during the festival were eagerly scanned
for clues on current thinking, but they produced only minor
surprises. Running Empty , a Lenfilm production directed by
Vladimir Vengerov, contained some outspoken remarks on
bureaucratic crassness (eagerly applauded by the audience)
and a gripping middle section concerning two men and a
lorry stuck in a wasteland of snow* The framing story, how¬
ever, was fairly trite. 3+2, a comedy about three men and
two girls who meet on holiday, had a defiantly modern sheen
with snazzy camerawork, American -style editing and a light,
bantering tone; quite pleasant, in fact, until it started to force
the charm and the jokes a little too hard. Most enjoyable of
those 1 saw was Who, Illarion , Grandmother and Me by the
Georgian director, Abouladze: virtually a series of comic,
lyrical and grotesque village sketches shot mainly out of doors,
it avoided the faded, studio-bound look of so much current
Soviet production and had a few genuine visual ideas as well.
Yet there was something a bit predictable about its treatment
of the young people; and the set pieces, like the scene of the
villagers leaving for the war, seemed to come out of the text¬
book rather than from any personal compulsion.

Towards the end of the festival, when everyone was showing
signs of celluloid weariness, our hosts eagerly prophesied that
Fellini night would provide the ultimate excitement. Moscow
audiences seem to warm to a good controversial evening out,
but the scene in and around the Palace of Congresses on the
night of Eight and a Half exceeded all expectations. By the
time the performance began, the theatre was jam-packed,
with nearly a hundred people squashed in the aisles upstairs,
while a huge crowd outside pleaded for tickets. Fellini him¬
self received a tremendous acclamation, even after he had
given a somewhat laboured “explanation** of the film as if to
anticipate possible criticisms of obscurity; and for about half
its running time, I felt, the audience was sympathetically
engrossed. At the end, when Mastroianni shakes off his intro¬
spection and joins the crowd, the applause was considerable if
not fervent. But some grim expressions and shaking of heads
in the foyer afterwards gave an indication of the storm that
was to come. After sixteen hours of debate and much bitter
arguing between the eight Eastern jurors and the seven from
the West and Asia (including Stanley Kramer, Satyajit Ray
and Jean Marais), the latter won the day and the film was
awarded the Grand Prix. Perhaps in an effort to soften the
blow, almost every other major film entered received a prize,
sometimes for very dubious reasons.

Reactions were immediate and conflicting. An elderly lady
interpreter at the British table in the Moskva answered my
request for an opinion on the Fellini with “very interesting,
of course, but it is the kind of film we try not to make.™ Later
in the Press Club, a young Soviet journalist told me how much
the award would mean to those younger film-makers who
were trying to break away from old formulas. I felt a little
uncomfortable when 1 had to tell him that, despite brilliant
flashes, much of the film for me was tired and vulgar and that
the best Fellini was to be found in his earlier work (which he
had not seen, of course). Shortly after the festival ended* the
official Soviet press came down heavily against the film, for
more orthodox reasons. “Vagueness and morbidity** were the
keynotes. Alexandrov, among others, argued that the award
was wrong, adding that anyone who thought that Soviet film¬
makers “unconditionally recognised this film and accepted its
philosophy was not only naive but deliberately unobjective.™
Another spokesman expressed the hope that “Federico
Fellini, a great artist, will overcome this dejection and create
works which will inspire the spectator with courage and
determination* instead of plunging him into despair and
despondency.™

+ * *

Will this controversial prize, coming only a few months
after Khrushchevas speech, have any lasting effect on Soviet

188

Soviet reo/ism; Mikhail Romm's "'Nitre Days of One Year'\
with Alexei Batalov as a victim of radiation sickness .

film policy and the thinking of both creators and audiences?
In order to answer this question, I shall have to make some
generalisations of my own based on what I was able to learn
during these two weeks. One thing is certain: Soviet film¬
makers of all generations are united in their desire to make
films which are “useful” both to the community and the
philosophy they serve. But, usually, they find it easier to
describe what they are against in other people’s wrork than to
specify what they want to do in their own. When they casti¬
gate the worst kind of commercialism from the West and
America, many Western critics can find areas of agreement*
although we also know the good, likeable Hollywood tradi¬
tion which exists alongside the bad. Believing, as they do, that
Hollywood once represented the ultimate in capitalist manipu¬
lation of the people’s will, they immediately acclaim a film
like On the Beach as a major exception, a truly progressive
work for peace, without regard to all its tortuous banalities.
Conversely, though many film people may have been excited
by the method and photography and flights of fancy of Eight
and a Half, they might also partially agree with the official
critics’ views that the hero’s confused musings were not ex¬
pressed in a meaningful or constructive way. If one suggested
that other directors, such as Bresson, have managed to create
introspective heroes of greater significance, no comparison
would be possible because they haven’t seen the films.

And here one arrives at the great stumbling block in all our
discussions. Since there are no specialised cinemas in Russia
as we know them, many major film talents like Renoir,
Antonioni, Bunuel, Ray and Mizoguchi are almost completely
unknown to the interested public, though there may be a few
private screenings for lucky film people. This is doubly re¬
grettable, as several of these artists could be said to have
something in common with Soviet thinking. Difficulties in
trade agreements and bureaucratic procrastination are con¬
tributing factors, as well as the fact that films bought for home
consumption must be deemed suitable for a mass audience —
Ray’s Apu trilogy, for example, was regretfully turned down
for this reason. Accordingly, Donskoi, a kindred spirit if
ever there was one, told me that he had seen only one Ray
film: Jabaghar, shown at the 1959 Moscow Festival.

* • *

The fact that the Soviet public and film-makers have only a
scanty knowledge of world cinema may help to explain why
audiences seem fairly content to accept the second-rate, and
also why they do not react very happily to ambiguities in
directorial styles and methods. I got the impression that they
respond to dear-cut statements on the screen without feeling
the need to judge either motivation or questions of artistic
taste. As at Cannes and Venice, bravura patches are quickly
recognised, though the greatest applause was reserved for
simple moral victories, as in the Japanese film Spoiled Girl ,
when the young hero plasters the bad boy all over a bar in a
particularly vicious fight, or the Yugoslav Kozara , when the
partisans perform all kinds of entirely unrealistic feats of
daring. In other words, if our audiences languidly accept the
violence, greed and corruption to be found in the Western
cinema, the Russians are no less ready to accept a cinema of
naive and calculated social gestures.

The critical climate does little to help this situation. Most of
what I heard or read in the festival’s official publications was
infinitely depressing, being couched in a thick and puddingy
jargon which uses a great many words to say practically
nothing. Along with all the verbiage and the rule-of-thumb
moral judgments, Russian critics are extremely painstaking in
working out the social implications contained in everything
they see. Occasionally, as in the analysis of Britain’s rather
unhappy official entry, Sammy Going South , one felt a sledge¬
hammer was being taken to crack a nut; and it was discon¬
certing for Sandy Mackendrick to find that, in the light of
Moscow, his adventure story emerged as a kind of racialist

Infant colonial in: o scene from “Sammy Going South' \

tract. The critic of Moskovskaya Pravda regretted that, at the
end, “this charming boy is invested, by the will of the authors,
with the moral traits of a cynical, militant colonialist.”

One might have been less unresponsive to these somewhat
extravagant judgments if the same critics had dealt equally
toughly with the more banal Eastern entries, with their
contrivances and na'fvet£s. But Soviet audiences receive few
tips from their critics on questions of style or individual talent
(admittedly, the situation is not that much better here). This
may explain why so much contemporary Soviet cinema looks
drably old-fashioned, or else knocks your eye out with dollops
of “style” which are either derivative or put in because they
are considered fashionable.

This lack of a general perspective and a really lively critical
climate unclouded by dogmas and persistent theorising may
also explain why a film like Tarkovsky’s Childhood of Ivanx
with its defiantly humanist message and ugly bravura fire¬
works, is thought more worthy of discussion than, say,
Heifits’ Lady with the Little Dog , whose calm, precise shooting
style has affinities, albeit indirectly, with the confident,
undemonstrative yet truly filmic tradition of Ford and Renoir.

In all these discussions with Soviet colleagues, I failed
almost entirely to find agreement on the proposition that
there is more than one kind of artistic activity. (I received a
surprised look when I told someone that I loved M-G-M
musicals as well as Eisenstein and Dovzhenko.) These doubts
and misunderstandings are not likely to be erased until the
Russians are able to assess both their own glorious past and
the rest of the world’s as well. One last example: during a
visit to the excellent State Film Archives, we ran a print of
Ivan the Terrible , Part II which was far superior to anything
seen in the West, and my young interpreter was completely
overwhelmed by her first experience of the film. Everywhere,
in fact, one could sense a desire among critics and film-makers
alike to break out and discover new paths, and somehow to
do so without forgetting the ideals to which their cinema and
society are committed. Despite its negative virtues, if the
Fellini award really does excite and promote some kind of
aesthetic revaluation, it may after all have proved an ironic¬
ally positive decision.

1S9

I am never quite sure how I feel about Leopoldo Torre
Nilsson’s films, I tend to enjoy most of them, but a little
shamefacedly, rather because, T have always suspected, they
give the impression that the director himself enjoys them, but
a little shamefacedly. There is always something a little too
voulu about their wildest extravagances for one either to accept
them with total frivolity, as one would those of Mildred Pierce,
or to be stampeded into submission by sheer force of personal
obsession, as one is in BunucPs best, most way-out films. In
the circumstances it was inevitable, when I finally ran Mr.
Torre Nilsson to earth where he was hiding in darkest
Belgravia to woik on the script of a forthcoming and (he
hopes) British film, that I should sooner or later edge him
round to this vexed question of his cinematic baroque, the
delight of some, complete anathema to others.

He smiled rather enigmatically behind the invariable dark
glasses (he was apparently pursued round Berlin this year by
cries of “Doctor Mabuse V* from passers-by). “My baroque
bits? It’s a peculiar thing, but I notice looking back that my
films are intricate and elaborate in style in an inverse ratio to
the degree of confidence I had in the story and characters at
the time. It seems to me that if I really believe in the people
and what they are doing, then I make the film very simply and
directly, without effects. But as soon as I begin to have doubts
I start to elaborate, as a sort of compensation 1 suppose, an
insurance against boredom and disbelief, AH this is quite
unconscious while I am working, but in retrospect I can chart
my involvement with my subjects very accurately by the
elaboration of my style. La Casa del Angel, for instance, is very
baroque, very elaborate, and then El Sequestrador hardly at
all. La Caida again has a lot of effects, and then Fin de Fiesta
hardly any. La Mano en la Trampa is a real showcase of
extravagances, but Piet de Verarto , which I was working on
immediately afterwards, is the simplest, purest and most
direct of all my films, perhaps because it is the one which has
been closest and most real to me in its subject matter,”

Did this mean, I wondered, that it was his favourite film?
“I don’t know. Perhaps it is the one I like best as a whole, but
1 feel too close to it to judge it properly.’* And El Sequestrador^
I pursued, since it remains one of my own favourites, “Ah,
that’s more difficult. You see it was the only film I made under
the impression that I was a genius, and my most complete
fiasco, I came back from Europe, where everybody seemed to
be saying that La Casa del Angel was marvellous, and it had
won prizes, and I suppose I was a bit swollen-headed. Anyway*
I set out to make El Sequestrador just to please myself, without
any consideration of my audience, and when it was finished
everyone, without exception, hated it. It didn't win any
prizes, it didn’t make any money, it didn’t even rate a few kind
words. Well, it was a good lesson; it gave me back a sense of
proportion ... I haven’t seen the film for years, though I have
the impression there are good things in it. The patient made
a good recovery, but it’s best to let the wound heal completely
before you remove the dressing.”

If El Sequestrador had been a box-office disaster, how had
his other films faied in the home market? Could they hope to
recover their cost in Argentina alone? “They can, yes, and
sometimes they do. By British or American standards they are
very cheap — about £20,000 each, I should say, and that is not
so much to get back. The trouble is that there is little popular
audience for native films; most of the mass audience goes
mainly to dubbed American films. An Argentine film has to
appeal to the same limited audience that goes to an Antonioni
or a Bergman film, and so it tends to be sold largely on snob
appeal. I think that only a small minority — perhaps about
20,000 — really understand at all or like what I am trying to do.
Still, back in the days when I was struggling to write avant-
garde verse, the idea of reaching an audience of even 20,000
would have seemed an extravagant and impossible dream.”

We talked of his close and almost unbroken collaboration
with his wife, the novelist Beatriz Guido (the only film he has
made without her in the last ten* Un Guapo del '900, he regards
as a straight commercial chore), I spoke of the extraordinary
correspondence of effect between the films and the published
stories on which they were based, even though detailed com¬
parison shows that the adaptation is usually very free. “Do
you find that ? Certainly the film is frequently not an adapta¬
tion* properly speaking, but an independent work derived
from the same sources and materials as the story. Of course
I am often deeply involved in Beatriz’s writing from the
earliest stages, and I frequently start working out the film
treatment in my mind while she is writing the story, so that
afterwards neither of us can quite remember what comes in the
book and what in the film. Sometimes a long script may come
from the same impulse as a very short story, as in the case of
this new script, A Beautiful Family , and at others, as with
Fin de Fiesta, the film may cover only part of a very long novel.
I like this new story very much, it is very delicate and simple.
Perhaps it is unusual for the British cinema [which, seeing that
it treats of an all-male triangle* is putting it mildly] but 1 hope
we shall be able to do it here. Of course raising finance here is
all so complicated : at home all I need do is take out another
mortgage on my house . .

* * *

you can hardly ask an actress why she has appeared in so
many bad films and so few good ones. At least, you can’t ask
most actresses, but Patricia Neal is the exception that proves
the rule. Indeed* she is there almost before you are, “Of all the
films I have made, there are perhaps five of which I’m not
ashamed,” she says cheerfully, and then starts numbering
them, only to conclude that in fact there may be no more than
four. They are Hud , A Face in the Crowd, The Breaking Point
and, rather surprisingly. Three Secrets , an early Robert Wise
film which she says was basically just a soap-opera but un¬
usually well done. Add to these Breakfast at Tiffany's , a good
film that she didn’t like herself in, and The Fountainhead , a

190

mad film which she recalls with ironic detachment as her none
too fortunate ‘big break’ in pictures, and you get a meagre
enough harvest for fifteen years in the cinema — for anyone’s
fifteen years in the cinema, but particularly for an actress of
the calibre of Patricia Neat,

Of course she has done other things as well : no one who
saw her in Suddenly Last Summer on the stage is likely even to
remember what Elizabeth Taylor was like in the film, and
glowing reports of her appearances on the American stage
have filtered over. But in the cinema for years she seemed to
appear only in nonsense like The Day the Earth Stood Still ,
Weekend with Father and Something for the Birds; so it was
hardly surprising, if after all a tittle disappointing, that so
many seem first to have woken to her talents in Hud, generally
with cries of * But where has she been all our lives 7 The answer
is that as far as British critics are concerned she has been right
under our noses, living quietly in the home counties with her
writer husband Roald Dahl. You would never know it, of
course, because Psyche 59, which she was in the middle of
shooting when I met her, is the first British-made film she has
appeared in since The Hasty Heart , Why? “Because nobody
has offered me a part before; they just say there aren’t that
many parts for American women in British films, and that’s
that.” Nevertheless she is playing an Englishwoman quite
happily in Psyche, the accent she is called on to assume being
merely a straightforward standard English. (“I think l can
manage that after living here for so long. It was when I was
asked to test for This Sporting Life and worked for a couple
of weeks with a woman who lives in my village to acquire the
necessary Northern accent that I realty realised my limita¬
tions!”)

As for her Hollywood career, she is philosophical. “I think
It matters an awful lot where you start. If you begin with a big
part in which you are perfectly cast and the film makes a lot
of money, you can ride along for about ten years on the result,
But if you start wrong, your career may never go right again.
The Fountainhead was my big break (Td only been in some¬
thing terrible called John Loves Mary before), and I was very
young, and very obsessed with the idea of becoming a great
actress. I had a constant battle to manage the part, and it was
mostly a solitary battle, because King Vidor, whom I love
dearly, is one of the old-style Hollywood directors who don’t
really expect to have to help actors. All he’d do when I had
problems was say ‘Come on, baby, give it all you’ve got/ when
really I was seriously wondering if I’d got anything to give in
the first place. And so I started out on the wrong foot, and
spent the next ten years trying to sort out my career. I’m not
sorry I made the films I did ; anyway I didn’t have much
choice. You can’t act except by acting, and you can’t stay in
pictures except by staying in pictures , , /*

Patricia Neal’s favourite among all the films she has made
is, understandably enough, Hud. With her stage background
she is naturally most at home working with directors like Ritfc
and Kazan who have been actors and work well with them.
Hud in particular seems to have been a happy communal
effort; “I think practically everyone on that film had worked
before with some of the others, and since Martin Ritt and the
Ravetches were all co-producers they had final say in how it
was made. We just sat round reading the script for two weeks
before we began shooting— rehearsing, we called it— and
really worked ourselves into it. And not only the actors
benefited; doing this wc found one or two serious flaws in the
original script in plenty of time for the writers to put them
right, instead of no one noticing till the rough-cut, which is
what usually happens. Just imagine, the scene where Paul
Newman sees me off at the bus station originally ended with
a great passionate kiss. I grumbled and grumbled about it, and
finally persuaded Martin that he would shoot it both ways,
with and without; then as we got further and further into the
thing everybody just realised that the kiss was wrong, and in
the end it was shot only the one way/’

Grocielo Surges in a scene from Leopolds Torre Nilsson's "Piel de
Verano'\ shown here os “Summer Skin”,

We are deep in a discussion of the essential difference
between Monica Vitti and Jeanne Moreau as screen stars
when it is time for Miss Neal to go back on set. She puts on
decorative dark glasses (in the film, a nicely nasty-sounding
psychological drama, she plays a woman who remains
psychosomatically blind after an accident). “You know, last
week for the first time in my life I seriously began to pray that
I might be fired from a role! I suppose it’s rather late in my
acting career for me to understand that on the screen you act
with your eyes, but then I’m always learning something in this
business!”

* * * V

the man responsible for Psyche 59 is Alexander Singer,
director of Cold Wind in August. He is one of the most
practical-minded and totally disarming of the latest genera¬
tion of American directors. Not for him any cloudy talk about
Art and the higher destiny of the film as a creative medium;
he strikes one as exactly what he is, a mad film-fan who loves
making films and delights unselfconsciously in the whole craft
side of the undertaking. I told him how much I enjoyed Cold
Wind in August as an exercise in telling an interesting story
interestingly and unpretentiously, and he seemed pleased.
“The prime object was to take a story that interested us and
a good but inexpensive cast, and make for 120,000 dollars a
film that looked as if it had cost 300,000. I wanted to work in
Hollywood, and this seemed the best way to do it. You see,
what Hollywood demands above all is a certain standard of
technical competence; and technical competence, moreover, in
a particular style. If you shoot like Jean-Lue Godard, however
brilliantly you do it, you’re dead as far as Hollywood is
concerned. So Cold Wind was deliberately shot in a fairly
conventional style, modified as far as I felt it could be by what
I personally would like to do if left entirely to myself. There
are perhaps four or five shots in the film which I really like
very much. But on the whole I’m pleased with the result; as
a compromise it seems to me a fair compromise.”

Actually, if any new American director is qualified to shoot
like Godard if he wanted to, it is probably Alexander Singer.
He was at school writh Stanley Kubrick and like Kubrick began

191

Patricia Neal, Samantha Eggar and Curt Jurgens in 44 Psyche 59"*

as a magazine photographer (“He got further faster than I did,
but then he was so much better than I was**) and made his real
beginning in the cinema with a forces film unit during his
national service. Here he had ample experience photographing,
directing and editing reportage films, and became a specialist
with a hand-held camera. Back in civilian life he hung around
film-making in New York, working ‘under the counter1 as
assistant director and cameraman whenever some expertise
with a hand-held camera was required, and also photographing
a number of non-commercial films, among them a document¬

ary about the painter Dong Kingman directed by James Wong
Howe. Finally he managed to get into the union as an assistant
director and worked in this capacity on Kubrick's The Killing,
as well as handling some of the actuality racetrack footage
after all attempts to get it by normal Hollywood means with
an eighteen-man crew had failed* There followed some
television work, Cold Wind in August x and now a three-film
deal with Columbia, Psyche 59 being the first. As Singer
himself says, “In films talent helps, but in the tong run it is
persistence that gets you places*14 Since on present showing he
himself has a fair share of both, his future progress should be
worth watching*

* * *

well, what more rs there left for anyone to say about
Cleopatra these days? Not, of course, that that prevents people
from saying it anyway, sometimes with quite interesting
results. The most entertaining contribution to the inevitable
succession of on-the-spot reportages is Walter Wanger’s My
Life with Cleopatra (written with the assistance of Joe Hyams,
movie editor of This Week ; I don’t know why, but I find
something irresistibly funny about the notion of even a diary
appearing as-told-to). The People seized eagerly on the juicier
bits for serialisation, while The Observer embarked three
weeks later on a tasteful rechmffi of some folly and grandeur
bits (without acknowledgment, but even retaining such
obvious slips in the original as ‘Randal* for Ranald Mac-
Dougall).

Despite all this excitement, blown up still further by
Spyros K. Skouras’s announcement that he was going to sue
Wanger for libel, what emerges most forcefully from the book
itself is the boring, grinding, unglamorous, endless routine of
the job. Not, admittedly, quite the usual sort of film routine,
but after a few months of “Liz in hospital with black eye and
badly bruised nose,” “JLM, ill with temperature and strep
throat, must remain in bed two days,” “Roddy McDowall
unable to work because of a broken tooth,” “Burton had been
out all night pub-crawling and celebrating * . * We couldn’t
wake him for his scenes, which caused a delay in shooting,”
“Rex called for the doctor today* The clinic is thriving” and
still, on the last (official) day's shooting, “JLM still ill.
Shamroy is having blood-pressure trouble. One of the horses
threw a rider, who ts hurt,” it must have got to seem just as
boringly routine as any other film assignment*

The chief oddity which emerged for me from reading the
book as a whole is the fantastic succession of writers who
were at one time or another used, called in, approached or
thought of to work on the script* From a fairly modest
beginning with one Ludi Claire, “an actress turned writer,”
assembling material into a rough script, we run rapidly
through Nigel Balchin, Lawrence Durrell (brought in as an
expert on Alexandria to give it class), Marc Brandel, Nunnally
Johnson and even, in an hysterica! moment no doubt, Paddy
Chayefsky, who turns in some “very interesting” ideas on the
script but has to be discounted because he would want six
months to rewrite it. Then there is the big break, and Mankie-
wicz starts all over again, with the aid first of Sidney Buchman,
then again of Lawrence Durrell and then of Randal (Le.,
Ranald) MacDouetalL But before the end desperate measures
are being considered: Paul Osborn, perhaps, or Lillian
Heilman, to provide the woman's angle? What the mind
really boggles at is the thought of what all these wildly
divergent writers in consortium would make of a script, and
how anyone could have expected even for a moment to get
anything coherent out of their combined operations. Still* who
expects a super-epic to be coherent?

ARK AD I N

The camera is lined up on

Patricia Neal for a $ hat in “ Psyche 59".

192

FILM

REVIEWS

Si

Harassed for so long by hiscritics, Fellini tried to grow up'to
them and give a realistically correct account of Roman society.
But the critics' theories were all wrong for him, and in spite of
moments of local brilliance, he was unable to save La Dolce Vita
from being a potage of botched intentions, aimless in its plot and
betraying a gossip column mawkishness in its approach to
questions of morality, of sex and religion* A creative compromise,
then ; and one which I suspect Fellini took cognisance of, for
(Gala) is an answer to his critics and their theories, a refusaMo
be browbeaten, a firm clearing of the decks*

Fellini's conviction is worth stressing, 1 think, if only because
the opposition have made so much of Otto e Mezzo11 s inconclusive¬
ness: that it was made at a time when Fellini was tired, for instance,
and that he improvised to such an extent that a fortnight before the
first showing he was still dithering about the choice of the final
sequence. But if we take the film on its own level, these criteria
turn turtle. Inconclusiveness appears as creative freedom- —a
freedom which is so controlled that Nino Rota’s music, Piero
Gherardi’s sets and costumes, and the camerawork of Gianni Di
Venanzo (a newcomer to the Fellini team) manage to be stimulating
in their own right and yet to merge tactfully into the director’s
style. Improvisation becomes a form of exploration ; and the chosen
ending is, in the light of what has gone before, inevitable. In fact,
this is the first time Fellini has managed to cram all his material
into one plot without bursting it at the seams; perhaps because
this is the first occasion on which he has used a formal irony. This
irony, I should say, is far from being novel: the theme of the self-
reflexive spirit, seeking out the meaning of an art form through the
use of that form, goes back to Coleridge and the origins of the
Romantic movement* All the same, as Fellini shows, the device is
still serviceable*

The film director Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni, very
much on form) is confined to a spa. He is depressed and unable to
work on his latest project, and he is surrounded by a group of
seemingly hostile figures, including his producer, scriptwriter, wife
and mistress. At first these figures irritate him no more than would
the scratches on a gramophone record of breathtaking music, for
he is haunted by his surroundings: images, memories and ideals
return to him, suggestions of some half-realised beauty* These
images are usually those of women, young and old — women dis¬
torted by two obsessions: his mother, and the church*

In his dreams, his mother and wife are interchangeable, and
harem girls bathe him in a childhood tub; while at the spa, his
Balbec, the Valkyries drinking holy water are dressed in the
extravagant hats and faded costumes of a half forgotten epoch*
As for the church — well, this portrait of an artist shows that he
too was taught to dread women as a young man. The traumatic
experience happened at school, when the priests (wickedly, Fellini
has some of them played by old women) chastised him cruelly for
lurking about the den of La Saraghina, a monstrous Rouault-like
prostitute. Even now, as a grown man, he is chilled when the
benign- looking Cardinal answers his plea— how can I find happiness?
—by quoting the eunuch Origen — only through the church can
truth be found—and offers him the uncompromising choice:
civitas dei or civitas diaboli. Fellini’s technique of association by
images is seen at its best here: a mention of Caesar leads on to the
bath sequence, of Roman faces above towelled togas moving
through curlicues of steam — images that suggest Michelangelo's
Inferno and prepare us for the meeting with the Cardinal* Civitas
diaboli: and we cut to a fashionable street and the glamour of the
spa. Guido has chosen damnation; but rightly so* perhaps, for he
does find a sort of happiness in an image of innocence, of a girl
called, almost inevitably, Cardinale.

And yet, much as Proust was unable to explain why the taste of

a petite madeleine brought him such ecstasy, so Guido is only
able to say that he is happy because “everything is as it was * * . I
am what I am, and not what 1 want to be ■ . In the final sequence
the magician draws together his images {the inexplicably fascinating
faces; the people he can only love when they have become part of
himself) into the glittering circus of childhood memory, beneath
the useless yet necessary rocket launching pad which cost eight
million lire. Only then, as he joins the completed circle, can these
images shore him up against his ruin and save him and his boyhood
self, who plays a piccolo against the increasing darkness. For
against the objections of his scriptwriter, who presents our objec¬
tions (it has all the deficiencies of an avant-garde film without any
of its merits, it is old-fashioned and its realism is bogus), Guido
demonstrates that his type of film must be created through his
authentic self, and not through the dictates of theory* “Do you
support the Catholics or the Communists?'’ asks a critic. But of
course the question is far too simple. Like a man trapped in his
car, he must free himself. His art must include all his past obsessions,
all that makes up his present self. The irrational must enter, so that
the false web of symbolism, of forced meanings, may be destroyed,
and the true and candid images emerge* “Are lies and truth the
same to you?" cries his wife, Luisa* To which he might answer,
like Brice Para in in Vivre sa Vie, that lies and evasions are part of
the totality, part of the search for truth.

This response, however, fails to answer Luisa’s case fully* Both
Guido and Fellini show themselves incapable of making the
distinction between the truths of the mind and those of behaviour*
The self-reflexive spirit can swiftly turn narcissistic, and although
Guido may confront his inner world, he fails to confront his social
obligations. Reality and dreams may merge, and yet the distinction
between them still holds. Because of this, you can (if you don’t like
the film) see Otto e Mezzo as a monstrous form of self-pleading, an
indulgence which coarsens the fantasies by making them seem too
easy* In fact I don't think Fellini confronted these fantasies easily,
but I do feel that he loves Guido at the expense of his persecutors;
and especially, despite a strong performance by Anouk Aimee, at
that of poor Luisa. These other figures lack weight, so that when
they are at the centre of the screen Otto e Mezzo thins out and the
mechanism of plot begins to show through* Nonetheless, though he
can’t face up to the total case, we must be grateful to Fellini for
having presented so much of it, and with such flair and exuberance.

Eric Rhode

BILLY LIAR!

ith billy uarJ (Warner-Pat he/Anglo Amalgamated), John
Schlesinger shows us that it is possible to make a film in this
country that has movement, energy, grace and charm, that it is
possible to make immense comic use of the remarkable Mr*
Courtenay and to exploit an industrial suburban setting for its
absurdly local yet characteristic happenings, for its sense of the
light-hearted as well as the drab. Like its central character, Billy
Fisher (Tom Courtenay), Billy Liar ! is a film of many moods, a film
of an essential ambiguity of feeling. As Billy's mind shifts from
reality to Ambrosia — his imaginary country where he always has
success — the film shifts with him, changing dreariness to farce. Yet,
since Billy does not really know how he feels at any particular
moment, we are not too sure how we feel about Billy.

While the film is pre-eminently successful in making us laugh, in
constantly inventing new comic situations, we cannot help but
recognise that Billy’s is essentially a tragic situation. In what is
intrinsically a more moving way than Thurber's Walter Mitty,
Billy’s tragedy is the result of his inability to take himself seriously*
He can't manage either to come to grips with his family and his job
in the undertaker's office, or to find the strength to leave them* His
Ambrosial fantasies are much too attractive; and it is part of the
charm at the centre of his character that his decision never to desert
them, in its rejection of harsh reality, is a decision always to remain
young* Yet, because the film is so close to its central character, so
much a part of his many moods, we recognise his plight without ever
feeling its impact. Like Billy, we find it more agreeable just to sit
back and laugh.

There is another problem too, that makes our response more
superficial than it might have been. Like Billy, the film rarely takes
itself seriously: even in his daily life, there are constant shifts into
fantastication and farce* By making Mr. Shadrack (Leonard
Rossiter) such an obvious figure of fun, by playing the roles of the
grandmother (Ethel G riffles) and of Billy's “bloody" father (Wilfred

m

Pickles) almost entirely for laughs, the film sacrifices much of its
emotional potential. And, at the same time that this element of
comic caricature heightens the ambiguity of feeling* it leaves certain
scenes dangling* oddly out of place in their context. For instance,
the talk with Councillor Duxbury (Finlay Currie) on the moors,
silhouetted and strangely symbolic* seems only tenuously related to
the rest of the film; as indeed the funeral fantasy* by sharply inter¬
rupting the more sombre rhythm of the final sequences and so
dispersing our feeling about the old woman’s actual death, certainly
detaches us from the potential poignancy of the close. Even the
opening shots behind the credits, travelling along rows of suburban
dwellings, keeping pace with the Housewife’s Choice which at the
moment is playing, although a marvellously lively beginning for a
very funny film* seem only obscurely related to Billy’s vanquished
march through the streets which closes the picture.

If by the end, then, we feel that we have been more amused than
moved by the film, that opportunities have been missed* we certainly
carry away some of the joy and excitement that appear to have gone
into the making of it. After Terminus and A Kind of Loving , Billy
Liar! represents a more confident achievement for John Schlesingcr,
who looks very much at home with the challenges of ’Scope.
Although the lack of unity seems a failure in conception, perhaps
chiefly in Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall's script, within in¬
dividual sequences Schlesinger's pace scarcely falters and his
judgment rarely errs. Most remarkable and most un- British is the
zoo m- tracking episode when Liz first comes to towpn. As she swings
gaily through the streets, hopping across obstructions and skipping
between cars* the camera follows her easily, observing her mugging
response to everything she sees. If both Helen Fraser as Barbara and
Gwendolyn Watts as Rita are more than adequate to their parts —
are indeed perhaps more suited to the caricatured context In which
they have been set— Julie Christie as Liz gives, to my mind, the most
stunningly attractive female performance that we’ve seen on the
British screen. That the strength of her performance, and indeed
of her female self, heightens the central implausibility of her
attraction to Billy and so further undermines the film’s unity, is
perhaps to be regretted. Yet the joy ful manner of her presentation is
so right for the general spirit of the film, and such a relief from the
stodginess of so many British pictures, that I find it difficult to
complain.

Finally, of course, the film is Tom Courtenay's. In this, his finest
part so far, no praise could be too much and yet all seems impossible.
It’s not just that his body is so limber and his face so minutely
expressive: itV more that just by a hint of an expression, a particular
glance of the eyes, we can see that a change of mood is about to
begin. Whether engaged in imaginary machine-gun slaughter of
the people he feels are thwarting him* or made conscious of his
real limitations when face to face with the magnificent Liz*
Courtenay’s playing has an intimacy and particularity about it
which makes him perpetually fascinating to watch. It is with the
help of such performances, plus some enterprising camerawork
(Denys Coop), that John Schlesinger has been able to make Billy
Liar! the most enjoyable film to have come out of the new
British cinema.

Peter Harcourt

NAZARIN

t first sight (and with hindsight too, as the films have reached
us in the wrong order), Nazar in (Contemporary) looks simply
like a more ambiguous version of Viridiana. As in Viridiana * the
initial problem is not difficult to diagnose. Nazarin is a priest who is
utterly innocent and utterly good. But he lives in an evil and corrupt
world, and in everything he does evil and corruption get the better
of his pure intentions* so that at the end he can be accounted a
failure, both in the world’s eyes and, since into the bargain he
nearly loses his faith, in his own.

The ambiguity lies in the fact that Bunuel refuses either to approve
or condemn his hero, with the result that the film can be read in two
different ways. Either we must take it that Nazarin is a fool and his
saintliness futile and absurd* or else that his perseverance in the face
of adversity is a living proof that faith is its own justification and
reward* and the things of the spirit better and stronger than those
of the flesh. Taken singly neither of these readings is satisfactory.
The second, to a non-Catholic (and this would include Buftuel, if his
opinion were to be asked), is merely repugnant. Nazarin may save his

Tom Courtenay and juice Christie in '‘Bil/y Liar!"

194

soul; but materially he is worse than useless — if not positively danger¬
ous, But if Nazarin is to be condemned, who is to be saved ? If he is
wrong, who on earth is right? If he is futile, then what on earth is
effective? The Revolution ? Possibly, but Buftuel does not say so. In
fact he offers no answer at all, even partial Just a portrait of a
sympathetic but otherworldly priest, and a fresco of a brutal but
undeniably authentic world. We have no choice, therefore, but to
accept both incompatible readings simultaneously, as hypothesis
and antithesis, and mediate, for what it’s worth, our own synthesis
to the problem.

This is the answer, or substitute for an answer, that Brecht
provides at the end of The Good Woman of Setzuan—" the curtains
dosed and all the questions open” — and more or less the same as that
in Viridiana, where at the end Viridiana sits down to play cards with
Jorge and Ramona, and the problem is uneasily shelved for the
duration. But Brecht did believe that solutions were possible, and
Buftuel in Viridiana left the audience in no doubt of his hatred for
his heroine and all she stood for. In Nazarin however the basic moral
ambiguity, Nazarin contra mundum, is not intended to lead to a
solution, but is an end in itself Buftuers dialectic is all antithesis
here, and his favourite weapon, beside physical shock, is paradox.
Nazarin (Francisco Rabal) is poor and he is generous ; he is robbed
and imposed on. He is humble and submissive, and he is pure : he is
found harbouring a prostitute and defrocked: accepts his humilia¬
tion stoically, but finds himself later convicted by his superiors of in¬
subordination and pride. Out of charity and a feeling for justice he is
kind in equal measure to the tw'o hysterical women who follow him
around; he is accused of needing a harem to satisfy his lust. He
responds to violence with submission, and provokes more violence
as a reply. Nor is he the only victim of this infernal dialectic. Andara,
the prostitute, is graced by the absurd devotion of a dwarf, the only
being who is prepared to offer it : in a moment of rage she kicks him
squarely in the stomach. When the other woman, Beatriz, is told by
her mother that her love for Nazarin is sexual (which it is), she throws
a fit, and the mother takes advantage of this to restore her to her
husband, wrho is a brute. Examples could be multiplied indefinitely,
and they all lead to the same conclusion, or lack of one. Perversity
and contradiction is the rule. Nothing goes right except when it goes
wrong, There is no solution to anything.

Somewhere, I feel, Buftuel does see a solution. But it is an
imaginary possibility which impresses itself on the film only by its
absence. There could be a world, he implies, in which Beatriz did
not have to choose between impotent frustration with a virginal
priest and brutalised submission to a possessive husband, This world
would be the utopia of the anarchist, but, realisable or not as a
utopia, it is certainly not real within the film. Whatever the intellec¬
tual possibilities of an alternative, the real world for Buftuel, and the
immediate world of his imagination, is a brutal and stupid one.
This is what he sees, and sees with an inward visionary eye as well as
outwardly. Into his vision he builds his ideas, a hatred of all that is
cerebral, spiritual or rational, Christian or bourgeois; and vision and
ideas are then used to reinforce one another in a dose and vicious
circle, from which, except by a prodigious leap of the imagination,
there is no escape. Between Viridiana and Jorge, between the twenty
sundry protagonists of The Exterminating Angel * locked up together
in mutual torment, between Nazarin and his persecutors, there is not
much to choose. Within the circle each is responsible for the other,
and each is as bad as the next.

Because Buftuel’s immediate vision covers only what is contained
within the circle, and embraces it only in its most crassly material
form, the problematic aspect of the film is easily obscured. The spect¬
ator is only struck by it after the film has ended, when he tries to piece
together what it all actually means, who is right and who is wrong,
The weakness of Nazarin is that it does require piecing together
afterwards. It does not fall into place as it goes along, like Viridiana;
nor does it deliberately defy rational construction, like The Exter¬
minating Angel or L'Age d'Qr,

My personal feeling is that Buftuers best films are not the
problematic ( Viridiana, Los Ohidados ), but the visionary and
irrational (including some of his commercial pictures); and that the
best moments in the problem films occur when the problem is least
in evidence and the visionary element takes control, unhampered
by the cold winds of reason. But the problem is a necessary part of
the vision, for Buftuel’s surrealism is really a kind of mysticism in
reverse, He has had to wrestle, not with the devil, but with the angel
in him, and in Nazarin traces of the struggle are still apparent. Like
Pascal he believes that man is neither angel nor beast, and that
*xqui vent faire Tange, fait la bite." Also like Pascal he is tremen¬
dously aware of the importance of deciding whether God exists or
not (if He did, Nazarin would after all be justified). Buftuel made his

Michel Subor in “Le Petit SoMot”,

decision, which is the opposite of Pascal's, long ago, but he has a
recurrent need to confirm it to himself and to anyone who is
prepared to listen, Nazarin is his most resounding confirmation to
date*

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

LE PETIT SOLDAT

Andr£ gide, who needless to say never really liked Cocteau Very
much, gives a glancing impression in his Journals of that infant
prodigy's notion of war-work. During the First World War Cocteau
was to be seen, dapper and incongruous in a borrowed soldiers hat,
exhorting his audience with patriotic little dances on top of a bistro
table. Bruno, the anti-F.L.N. adventurer of Jean-Luc Godard's Le
Petit Soidat (Academy), is nothing like as saucy: equipped, like the
older Cocteau, not with soldier's hat but with camera, he defines
film as being ''‘truth 24 times a second”, and utters premonitions
about photographing death. Like Cocteau's Thomas Timposteur , he
seeks “a sham death in which fiction and reality become one,” And
throughout the film's journalistic commentary on his states of mind
as he falls in love, abortively attempts assassination, mirror-gazes,
undergoes torture, he offers an exhaustive estimate of his reactions,
his likes (Klee, America for its cars, Bach for the early morning and
Mozart for the evening) and dislikes (politics, the Midi, Lawrence
of Arabia), Such a devotedly introspective record is likely to tax the
generosity of most of us. For one thing, w^e are being dared to share
Bruno’s (and, let’s make no bones about it, Godard's) overriding
sense of self-importance — and why not, except that few of us like
to have character- references thrust, unsolicited, upon us?

And what a reference! Complacent and self-congratulatory in
tone (“I wras very young and very silly still''); portentous (“For me,
the days of action are past; the time for reflection has come”);
melodramatic (Bruno’s gun is “black, mysterious, incorruptible”);
fastidiously literal (“She wasn't as beautiful as yesterday''); suffering
from a sort of intellectual measles marked by sex-in-the-head
(“Are her eyes Velasquez- or Renoir-grey?”) and a rash of cultural
name-dropping — Bernanos, Malraux, Giraudoux, Modigliani,
Aragon, Leslie Caron. Prolonged torture has little apparent effect
on him, increasing if anything his monologic staying-power as he
reaches the stunning conclusion that one likes some things (and
people) and dislikes others. When we add to this Godard’s own
recent admission that his next film “didn't mean anything” (though
there's surely a time limit to the amount of pleasure to be derived
from viewing a bouquet of flowers); when we are faced, in fact, writh
Bruno. 'Godard's disavowal of political* moral and social theory in

195

favour of pure aestheticism, it is hardly surprising that Godard's
future career should remain shrouded, for most of us, in uncertainty.

And yet, for ail the self-mythologising compulsions of his heroes,
Belmondo and now Michel Subor, and their truculent, self¬
consciously “with it" rejection of all cherished ideals, these are not
the real factors behind Godard’s continued equivocal standing as
an artist. Admittedly Vivre sa Vie realised Godard’s obsessive world
of disengagement to the full; but though the equivocation was
accordingly less marked, the paradoxical nature of his talent
remains. And it is contradiction which, I suspect, is at the bottom
of many critics’ reluctance to commit themselves to Godard as
readily as they have accepted Truffaut.

What are the poles of these various inconsistencies? I would say
a life-giving urgency and abundance of visual style coupled with a
meandering excess of verbal polemics; despair (Godard reveals his
usual ritualistic predilection for last-minute slaughter) coupled with
a peremptory demand for love and liberty; the woolliest kind of
intellectual disaffiliation coupled with a clinically detached and
clear-eyed view of terrorism; defensiveness about the ugliness of
torture (Bruno tells us there’s no point in dwelling on it, and the
camera averts its gaze from each pain-filled climax to make a
mannered journey along the dark contours of the house) coupled
with a detailed record of the mechanics of torture.

Paradoxes Like these may weLl be deliberate* l think they are*
That doesn’t preclude their defining Godard’s limitations* There is
both innocence and guile in their deployment, for not only do they
help explain Godard’s considerable appeal, they offer ample evidence
of his knowing complicity in this appeal* There is truth in Bruno’s
attitudinising, but it is still a modish truth. The sum of his contradic¬
tions is reflected not only in the work of many young French
intellectuals, hut in the attitudes of other young (and not quite
so young) people here and in America and elsewhere* Not for
nothing, one feels, do those atrocity photographs in Bruno's room
jostle for wall -space with pin-ups.

One contradiction remains, however, and it nags like Cocteau’s
soldier-hat, Self-validation is fine, but it relies vitally on whether the
artist’s choice of style and attitude can match up to his (in this case)
sobering theme. The crucial question, it seems to me, is whether
Godard has succeeded in wedding his disenchantment with hollow
idealism to that same crudely (and 1 don’t use the word in its
pejorative sense) manipulated B-picture ideology which he first
propounded in A Bout de Souffle, For there is no doubt that Bruno's
grotesquely unsubtle attempts at murder, his evident immunity to
fierce physical persuasion, his lucky escape through a first-floor
window, his immediate success with the girl played by Anna
Karina, are all meant to be accepted as unquestioningly as they
would be in any Hollywood pulp-thriller*

It is here, 1 think, that Godard founders on an artistic fallacy. In
the process of rejecting Left and Right and all that is hortatory or
troublesome, he has merely put in their place another commitment,
parasitically built upon film-going experience, which is just as over¬
simplified in its determinations of good and evil, just as damaging
to the complexity and depth of human relations. What remains
unclear is whether he is equaling the hired killer with Marx, Freud
and all the other charismatic ideals, or stating a preference for him
as somehow being more “honest"* Honesty is a word that has been
much applied to the film — it offers an honest statement about the

attitudes of young people today, an honest portrait of Bruno, and
so on* But, in the absence of anything broader than self-assertive
rhetoric and short, sharp pangs of physical experience, it is difficult
to respond whole-heartedly to the complexes of an artist whose
dilemma springs from a determination to act solely on the mandate
of the self.

Godard’s stylistic habits and paradoxes suggest one further con¬
clusion. His almost documentary presentation of solitude, brilliantly
aided and abetted by Raoul Coutard's photography, in the last
analysis confirms one’s reservations. Take, for instance, the familiar
evocative string of alternately bold and blurred images; on the one
hand the stark hallucinatory outlines of black, neon-lit streets or the
isolated figure against an empty white expanse of wall; on the other
the jagged, close-quarters inspection of the two young men on the
train, luxuriating in drearily jolly anecdotes of violence* The sense
of staleness and threat is rivetingly conveyed as an extension of
Bruno's own state of mind; and it owes a lot, revealingly, to Dreyer,
who shared in his better-known films Godard’s preoccupation with
the lonely* the hunted and the doomed. The frequent suspension of
sound, the silent-movie piano score by Maurice Leroux, the
Vampyr* like way in which disjointed snatches of innocent conversa¬
tion take on immediate and inexplicably sinister overtones— all these
tricks, not to mention the heroine's surname, derive from Dreyer*
So that what we are being offered is not an apprehension of life, but
of imminent death; not thought, but a reflex of thought and, more¬
over, moviemania thought at that* Just as Wajda seduced us with
Gothic symbols in Ashes and Diamonds (a film on a not dissimilar
theme), so Godard seduces us with a mixture of newsreel actuality,
hipsterism, serie noire and Dreyerian intimations.

The result is a vision at once potent and facile; too facile, cer¬
tainly* to lend force to the film's ultimate conclusion—that the
heroine’s tragic death has given Bruno an awareness not only of his
own responsibility for his acts, but of life itself. There is precious little
recognisable life, anyway, in Karina's Hayden-dancing, head-shaking,
hair-combing cover girl* She is another movemania dream, a
gorgeous puppet; and the unlikely revelation that she is an F.L.N.
agent seems part of the same dream. To a greater extent than he
perhaps recognises, Godard owes his vocation to the tradition of
the Agonised Romantic, and with that goes his desire to shock and
seduce his audience. The disciplines of likelihood and logic are
outside his function as he sees it; and if Vine sa Vie convinces us in
its concern for the Karina character, this is not because Godard has
bowed to accepted Freudian and sociological theory. He hasn't,
and there's no reason why he should. It is because (and Godard
himself would probably scorn the orthodoxy behind such a sugges¬
tion) the despair-tainted life of a prostitute recommends itself to his
ethos, yet manages to avoid that discrepancy between subject and
sensibility which makes Le Petit Soldat such a fantastic piece of
sophistry*

Peter John Dyer

FREUD -THE SECRET PASSION

Intelligence and restraint are the most marked qualities of
John Huston's Freud— The Secret Passion (Universal-Inter¬
national/ Rank), a fictionalised account of an indeterminate period
in the life of Sigmund Freud, beginning in 1885 (when he was
twenty-nine) and including his studies under Charcot in Paris, his
marriage, his first application of the technique of psychoanalysis, his
self-analysis, his association with Dr. Breuer and his discovery of the
Oedipus Complex*

Taking considerable dramatic licence, the film has used it to
convey a surprisingly valid general impression of its subject.
Studious attention is paid to extant photographs and other pictorial
documentation; the scene in Charcot's clinic, for instance, bears a
striking resemblance to the lithograph brought back from Paris by
Freud. Huston's visual vocabulary, although never original,
captures with sombre authority the precise overtones that the
adjective “Freudian” has acquired in everyday language. Freud
himself (Montgomery Clift), meditating under Gothic arches or
clutching his mother’s snake bracelet, inhabits a waking world of
Vienna that is almost as symbolic as the etched world of the womb
which he re-enters in his dreams* The filtered scenes, in which his
patient, Cecily (Susannah York), relives her past, both real and

"Freud — the Secret Passion a dream sequence in which Freud
reconstructs his father's funeral *

1

imagined, are perhaps the most arresting examples of Douglas
Slocombe’s consistently effective mood photography.

The plot, by Charles Kaufman, aiming at veracity of flavour rather
than incident, telescopes the bulk of Freud's most easily appre¬
hended and generally palatable ideas into a comparatively short
space of time and the analyses of relatively few cases. Freud’s
conclusion that hysteria stemmed from a passive sexual experience
before puberty was, in actual fact, based on thirteen fully analysed
cases, and not on the single case of Cecily Koertner (roughly that of
“Fraulein Anna Q.”)* who provides the fictitious springboard for
a wide range of findings in the film. This fairly intelligent piece of
compression does, of course, incur a loss of depth- The exact nature
of this loss is implicit in the surprise expressed by his biographer,
Ernest Jones, at Freud’s “credulous acceptance of his patients’
stories of seduction.” Dr. Jones proceeded to find in this enigmatic
credulity a key to the nature of Freud’s genius — something that the
film, attempting to cover too much ground on too slight a founda¬
tion, has no time to explore. Moreover, Freud’s main reason for
giving up his belief in the reality of these seductions was their
impossibly high incidence- Here the film, awkwardly limited to a
single case, has recourse to its crudest dramatic device- that of the
patient threatening to commit suicide unless she is believed. This
improbable scene (valid only in the sense that Freud had, more or
less, imposed his original theory on his patients) is the more regret¬
table in that it is not typical of the production as a whole.

The film was, of course, made without the authorisation of Jones’s
heirs, and against the wishes of the Freud family, which no doubt
explains the almost total omission of Freud’s intensely experienced
emotional life. Montgomery Clift has to do his best with a very
desiccated character compared with the real Freud, and the final
screenplay, by Kaufman and the producer Wolfgang Reinhardt, is
more concerned with abstractions than with people.

An intellectual adventure of this kind is an enormous challenge
to any director, and best suited to a poet of the cinema, which
Huston emphatically is not. In fact, Huston seems inhibited rather
than inspired by it: his energy bottled up and his camera forced to
a standstill by careful compositions. A reference in the opening
commentary to Copernicus and Darwin, and indications throughout
the film of society's antagonism to Freud’s ideas, imply that Huston
and his scriptwriters understand what sort of revolution Freud
brought about. Yet there is no attempt to interpret this in terms of
attitudes that have altered as its direct consequence. The film might
have been made at the time of Freud’s death (in 1939) or even
earlier, and said as much, or as little. One is not implying that it
could, or should, have added anything to the sum of human know¬
ledge; what one would have liked to see was an addition to the sum
of human experience. It should have recreated the feeling of being in
at the birth of something that has, for better or worse, established
a new heaven and a new earth. The duality is important for, as far
as Freud's work is concerned, it is no longer a matter of preaching
to the unconverted* but of interpreting to a generation already
conditioned by an accomplished fact. Curiously, the film suggests
no awareness of this; in expressing the hope that we will make
use of the knowledge “now within our grasp,” the final commentary
contrives to strike the very note of timid anachronism least suited
to its soaring theme,

Elizabeth Sussex

In Brief

EVE (Gala) is really a rather worrying case: a film which succeeds
very well on its own terms even though its terms are not now,
apparently, at all what the director originally had in mind, Advance
reports from France assured us that with twenty minutes shorn from
its original 150-odd it was jumbled and virtually incomprehensible;
so the news that the British version was twenty minutes shorter still
led one to expect that nothing would be left, except perhaps a few
isolated moments such as enlivened The Damned . But not at all;
whoever did the cutting for the British version seems to have made
an exceptionally tactful and intelligent job of it, removing all the
loose ends of the French version and leaving a classic exposition of
amour fou in a fairly simple story told in a reasonably direct and
uncluttered fashion. Admittedly, one may wonder here and there at
the casual way characters are brought in when they have some
bearing on the central plot, and shuffled unceremoniously off the
scene when they haven’t (that played by James Villiers is an obvious
example); but on the whole what we see of them engenders nothing
but relief at their summary dispatch.

Jeanne Moreou and StarWey fiaker m “Eve”.

The result is almost certainly not quite the film Joseph Losey
intended, which clearly had far more pretensions (whether justified
or not it is difficult to guess) to intellectual and psychological
profundity. But as it stands it does make a thoroughly teasing,
enjoyable and, after all, quite intelligent entertainment out of a
basically rather trashy and commonplace story. In James Hadley
Chase’s original, an American writer of dubious credentials (he stole
his first book from his dead brother but has subsequently written
successes of his own) falls for a trampy femme fatale who little by little
destroys him. In the film he becomes a Welsh writer straight out of
Alim Owen, and his temptress a glamorous gambler on the fringes
of the international set, while their affair unrolls against a panorama
of wintry Venice stunningly captured in black and white by
Antonioni’s favourite photographer, Gianni Di Venanzo. Thus
dressed, the story takes on, if not greater profundity, at least greater
interest and novelty-value. Stir in some outre references— a harking-
back to Billie Holiday, either through her records or through her
autobiography, which the heroine is at one point glimpsed reading
in the street; an almost equally obsessive preoccupation with Garbo,
usually apparent from the way the heroine is photographed and
related to her physical surroundings— to give it all intellectual chic,
and what more do you need ?

Well, naturally, Jeanne Moreau to play the temptress. Having
secured this last vital ingredient, Losey certainly makes the most of
her. It is not by any means her best or subtlest performance, but it is
a blazing piece of star acting every inch of the way, remote, myster¬
ious, fabulously glamorous, five times larger than life. At the end
of the film we are not one whit nearer to understanding why Eve’s
life should be dedicated as it is to the dual passion for acquiring
money and destroying men, but when did femmes fatales have to
explain themselves? is a superlatively glossy and elegant
entertainment; one cannot help wondering whether, if it were given
the room to aim at something more, it might not well end up as
something decidedly less. JoHN russell Taylor

initially at least, it seems as if Nanni Loy’s THE FOUR DAYS
OF NAPLES (Gala) is the film animated by those qualities of
honesty and intelligence necessary to put straight the record on the
Italian resistance, confused since Open City in 1945. At last, one
feels, a film that is history and not hagiography. The joyful, ever so
slightly ironic shouts of “We've lost the war!” which greet the
opening announcement of Mussolini’s overthrow, suggest that at
least conventional patriotic heroics have been safely put away for
the duration. Fallacious impression: for within five minutes the film
has degenerated into cliche, from an Eroica alNtaliana to simple
(and atrociously dubbed) Heroics, Italian style. It becomes abun¬
dantly clear that it is not honesty that motivates the film, but piety —
piety to the heroic people of Naples and to the unity of the Italian
resistance. No doubt the Neapolitans deserve this homage to their
memory. The Naples rising was a memorable isolated event in the
pre-history of the organised resistance, and because it was isolated
and premature it was both more spontaneous and lacked the
fratricidal elements of the later struggles in the North. Historically,
it presents no problem: it was straightforward anti-German and
anti- war, and the film, mechanically, follows suit.

197

Commonplace in its intentions, and with a script and direction
that are insufficiently incisive and dramatic to realise these intentions
to the full, Nanni Loy’s film has at least the virtues of its vices.
Where the piety and tendentious ness fail to convince, or to appear
at all, the elements of a good, honest-to-man amoral war film break
surface and reanimate the screen. Contrary no doubt to its original
intention, the film demonstrates brilliantly the near impossibility
of inadequate occupying forces holding down an uprising in a
totally resistant city, once the task has been accomplished of getting
a courageous few to initiate the rising in the first place. It captures
the atmosphere of confused street fighting better than any compar¬
able European film (a Fuller film on this subject would, in this
respect if no other, make compulsive viewing). Cameraman and
laboratories between them also deserve credit for a photography
that is sharp and modern, yet mingles well with occasional stock-
shots from wartime documentaries. For the rest one’s main com¬
plaint-leaving aside the question of history versus hagiography—
is that, except for substituting a (theoretically anonymous) Lea
Massari for the more traditional Magna ni figure, Four Days of
Naples is in almost all respects indistinguishable from so many
other similar films on similar themes.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

THE RAVEN {Anglo Amalgamated! Warner-Pathe). 24 years ago
Tower of London torturer Boris Karloff drowned Vincent Priced
Duke of Clarence in a butt of malmsey. There was nothing aus¬
picious about the partnership at the time, Indeed only a year or two
later Karloff, Peter Lorre and Bela Lugosi were attending the death
agonies of the Tbirties-style horror film in You'd Find Out, a
singularly joyless spoof of its own kind. Now 75, as distinguished
and obliging as ever, Karloff has been reunited with Price and Lorre
in The Raven, an altogether luckier parody about a trio of rival
fifteenth century sorcerers. Richard Matheson’s script, a good deal
more tenuous than its predecessors in the Corman-Poe canon, at
least treats its actors generously to props, incantations and quotable
lines. Price is gingerly taking stock of the ingredients (dried bats’
blood, vultures’ tongues, entrails of uneasy horse) to deliver Lorre
of his corvine form, when he finds that he has run out of dead man’s
hair. Generously he offers to rob his long-departed father of a lock
or two, and while Lorre commiserates on the cobwebby disorder of
his host’s family crypt (“Gee! Hard place to keep clean, huh?*’),
father’s corpse rises urgently to lay a decaying hand on his son’s

arm. “Beware!” bemoans, kindly if a trifle inexplicitly, sinking back
exhausted to await his second summons from the tomb. This takes
place, a hallucinatory flash as effective as the last shot of Ma Bates
in Psycho, during the film’s climax— a splendid duel of supernatural
strength between a high-camping Price (literally up the ceiling at
one point) and Karloff’s sternly frowning Dr. Scarabus. Neck-
tw'ining snakes become scarves; a baby cannon strolls in from
Feui Hade’s Les Vampires ; Floyd Crosby’s Panavision, Pathecolor
camera weaves and prowls in somnambulistic bliss. A pity the
equation doesn’t always add up : there’s too much slack, due perhaps
to an imbalance between the comedy, which runs riot, and the
horror, which trails behind in the wake of previous Corman films.
Rathbone would have been an asset — his Richard III did wonders
for Tower of London , and he concluded Gorman’s last film. Tales of
Terror , on a steadyingly grave and astringent note. Admittedly Hazel
Court is a pretty fiendish substitute as Price’s faithless spouse,
Lenore. Her fiendishness just isn’t in the same class, that’s all.

Peter John Dyer

CLEOPATRA (Fox). Everyone within reach of a gossip column
knows that Cleopatra did not spring (more’s the pity) fully grown
from the head of Walter Wanger. The sets left sadly crumbling at
Pinewood; the changes in director, scriptwriters, stars; the illnesses
and the quarrels; the adding of this and that to the budget; the
Taylor- Burton story: Cleopatra long ago stopped being just a film
and became one of those great symbolic objects littering the con¬
temporary scene. Yet within the publicity cocoon there still lingers
the comparatively modest little epic that Walter Wanger, the man
who saw it through all its troubles, apparently first had in mind ; and,
oddly enough, that’s approximately w hat remains. If we hadn't been
told so often just what it cost, it would be hard to deduce it from what
appears on the screen.

As usual, and in spite of everything, Egypt and Rome look as
though the decor had been conceived by someone for whom earth
could hold no fairer sight than a Hilton Hotel. The big scenes of
luxury and splendour (the dinner on Cleopatra’s barge, or her
circus-show ride into Rome) suggest that Egypt, too, had its PR
men, borrowing their ideas of grandeur from Che rituals of the film
premiere. And an odd result of this softened-up vulgarity (which is
never of the blinding, bad taste DeMilie sort) is that Antony and
Cleopatra suddenly appear in a new and wholly unexpected light as
the first expense-account high-livers, roistering away while the slaves
and eunuchs hover like expectant head-waiters. Perhaps this is
partly because even the final script (by Joseph L. Mankiewicz,
Ranald MacDougall and Sidney Buchman) has not achieved
anything like consistency of tone. At the end, the dialogue seems
drastically inhibited by an awful awareness that it must risk com¬
parison with Shakespeare, and gropes helplessly after a tragic idiom
of its own. Earlier, much of the script is of the order known as
literate* — that is to say, the sentences are very carefully grammatical
and just a little too long for some of the actors to speak with ease
or conviction. And then we go modem, with a pert "Oh, it’s you!”
from Cleopatra when Caesar stumps into her bathroom, or a
hysterical “Get out!” from Antony. *Tve been reading your com¬
mentaries,” says Cleopatra, as a polite, if outre, conversational
gambit to Caesar.

Joseph Mankiewicz has tried— indeed he has — to make this a film
about people and their emotions rather than a series of sideshows.
But for this ambition to hold up, over the film’s great footage, he
needed a visual style wrbich would be more than merely illustrative,
dialogue really worth speaking and actors altogether more per¬
suasive. As the sets seem to grow bigger and bigger, so progressively
the players dwindle. Rex Harrison, who has the diction that can
make a mild quip sound like genuine wit, is an efficient, light-weight
Caesar; Roddy McDowall sneers under yellowr curls as Octavian;
Kenneth Haigh makes an unusually plebeian Brutus; Pamela Brown
glides down corridors as some sort of high priestess; and Richard
Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, it must be admitted, remain very
much Mr. Burton and Miss Taylor. There are, of course, moments:
the opening shot, of the funeral pyres on the battlefield; the first
sight of Cleopatra’s barge sailing into Tarsus; Antony’s flight from
Actium, with the prow of his boat cutting through his own men as
they struggle in the water. Here the camera is saying something.
But Cleopatra (and whether the name itself should be pronounced
with a long or a short V is left appropriately vague) remains
a film without immortal longings.

Penelope Houston

Duef of sorcerers in “The Raven".

198

ROBERT

PROPAgaNDA

VAS

The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be
proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it ... .
Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and to sell his soul to the devil
in the hope of history's absolution.— Extract from the Diary of N. S. Rubashov
in Arthur Koestler’s " Darkness at Noon".

The idea, for this article came during a recent stay abroad when J watched a
television broadcast of Battleship Potemkin. An audience of many millions is an
event even for an acknowledged classic: the maggots wriggling in the rotten
meat, the sinister ‘intellectual’ pince-nez swinging on the bulwark and Vakulinchuk’s
martyrdom made their disturbing way into the cosy living-rooms. Then, after the
pathetic scene of the catafalque on the shore (“For a Plate of Soup”), the scene faded
out. End of Part One — and the screen burst into an idyllic landscape of green pastures
complete with yodelling shepherd and peacefully browsing cows, swiftly compressed
into a tiny bouillon cube as happily mooing symbols of Concentrated Energy. This
was followed by the Last Word in Boot Polish: reflected in the shiny tip of a shoe
we can see the tin. On the tin there’s another tiny shoe which reflects another tin on
which there’s . . . and so on. Then we went back to Part Two of the main feature, the
glittering Czarist boots on the Odessa Steps ; and the inevitable, almost too obvious

199

Nuremberg Ro/fy: a shot from ^Triumph of the WM".

link between the two scenes lent an almost intolerable
obscenity to the horror that followed. The mother walked up
the steps holding the dead body of her son, her glasses broken
to splinters, 4LJt could never happen with New Contact Safety
Lenses/’ I thought . * , and never before has the scene evoked
quite such emotional intensity.

Inevitably, almost of its own volition, the idea crystallised:
not so much the difference between good and bad propaganda
(those commercials were excellent of their kind, depending
quite a lot, in fact, on an Eisensteinish cutting technique), but
the way we have all grown hardened to it and are left untouch¬
ed. Having become an everyday occurrence, film propaganda
has lost its drive, and with it the stimulating role it has so
often played in the history of the cinema,

Or perhaps it has simply taken the wrong direction? If so*
why and how did this happen? Certainly something to think
and write about. But even to raise the questions is far from
easy, since the subject is vast and almost unexplored. Apart
from the classic definitions, some routine classification and a
few random thoughts, propaganda films are simply taken for
granted. Propaganda, we tend to think, is something we live
with* inevitable and inescapable. The Central European
proverb “I caught a Turk — he won’t let me go” fits the
situation perfectly. The word ‘propaganda’ has acquired all
sorts of overtones during the last quarter of a century; and
along with this extension of meaning has grown up that basic
mistrust which is our only weapon of defence against it. What
on earth could be more suspect than film propaganda?
Cinema itself may be called a cheat against reality, but the
way the propaganda film operates is a double cheat — it is, in
effect, nothing but the sad story of how they’ve pulled the
wool over our eyes.

To raise the moral issues and contradictions involved in this
kind of film is yet another task. Did it fertilise the art of the
cinema, or work against it? Did it liberate or shackle cinema’s
powers of expression? We are bound to ask more questions
than we can hope to answer. But this article is intended as a
sort of subjective reconnaissance of only a few aspects of the
subject, mainly those concerned with the creative side rather
than with the equally important questions of audience
response. Enough if it helps to prepare the ground for a more

disciplined and organised attack on this contradictory and
menacing subject*

* * *

Grierson's classic definition, “Propaganda is the art of
public persuasion,” does justice to the concept and views it
with patience and hope* But this was written in the early
Thirties, when propaganda films in Britain meant socially
conscious educational material about aero-engines, slums or
the six-thirty postal collection. To propagate was the same as
to sow the seed of general knowledge* With the film ‘"a single
say-so can be repeated a thousand times a night to a million
eyes. It opens a new perspective, a new hope to public per¬
suasion.” One cannot but feel a certain nostalgia for this
period when all our handy definitions were born; when such
concepts were still pure and uncorrupted, offering themselves
up to clear-cut classification*

As early as 1931, Paul Rotha had enough apt examples to
lay down a categorisation which is still perfectly valid, “Film
propaganda,” he wrote in Celluloid* The Film Today, “may be
said to fall roughly under two heads* Firstly, there is the film
which wields influence by reason of its incidental background
propaganda. Secondly, there is the specifically designed
propaganda film, sponsored as an advertisement for some
industry or policy*” And it was in the same essay that he put
into words the idea that inevitably comes to mind when
thinking about this subject: “In one form or another, directly
or indirectly, all films are propagandist. The general public is
influenced by every film it sees. The dual physio-psychological
appeal of pictorial movement and sound is so strong that if it
is made with imagination and skill, the film can stir the
emotions of any audience.” John Grierson put it all more
dramatically: “No form of description,” he wrote, “can add
nobility to a simple observation so readily as a camera set low
or a sequence cut to a time-beat*”

This is why film and propaganda had to meet. Cinema is
reality sifted, pointed and intensified; propaganda is a sifted,
pointed, intensified idea used for a specific purpose. And their
co-operation was a genuinely mutual one* First involuntarily,
then more and more consciously, they have always leaned on
each other, When cinema first became aware of its own
language and power, it was, in fact, through propaganda*
From then ort its great moments were also those of the “art
of persuasion”*

Perhaps it all began with the committed way Birth of a
Nation was put together : the construction of, say, the scene of
Lincoln’s murder, provoking hatred for the assassin and
sympathy for the unsuspecting President. The scene of the
liberating Klansmen intercut with the lynch gang makes an
even more outspoken (and in fact contradictory) propagandist
statement. And closely allied is Kuleshov’s famous experiment
using a single shot of Mosjoukine’s face apparently reacting
differently when juxtaposed first with a shot of a plate of soup,
then a coffin with a dead woman, and finally a little girl
playing with a funny toy bear. Isn’t this innocent little trick
a key to all the more sinister ones that were to follow? It was
the young Soviet cinema which used it first, along with all
those other methods which the text-books call the basic
principles of the art of the film* In Eisenstein’s Strike (1924)
we find the first intuitive, crude formulation of almost every¬
thing that has followed up to the present day, from the sheer
elementary power of moving images to the most complex
metaphors and abstractions*

It was an intellectual urge which made Eisenstcin seek out
this language; but he was also a propagandist* in those days
even a pamphleteer* It was the effort to achieve propagandist
simplicity that encouraged him to think in symbols like The
Capitalist and The Proletarian — and so to explore for the
first time the cinema’s ability (and in a way necessity) to work
in terms of types. It was the loose, undisciplined, Mayakov-
skyish propaganda which enabled him to conceive his film
with only an intellectual continuity, and allowed him to

200

ramble freely between the naturalism of the rubber hose
sequence and the grotesque and puzzling abstraction of the
gnomes, or to link the shot of the slaughtered bull to a
clumsily infernal tableau of massacred workers. Strike was the
first resounding exclamation mark in the history of the cinema,
as well as the first haphazard specimen of its intellectual
capacities.

Editing, as Eisenstein used it, is a way of showing one's true
colours. A cut is a kind of helpful conflict, a harmonic contrast
between two shots. A cut in Battleship Potemkin between the
boots of the Czarist troops and the desperately fleeing crowd
is a plea in itself: a division between good and evil done with
the intensity which only a propaganda film can afford and only
a sharp cut can put over. And it was out of this propagandist
immediacy that one of the cinema’s most versatile and dynamic
means of expression emerged.

This was the first common ground between film and
propaganda, and led to the first turning-point in their history.
Before Potemkin, film propaganda was used only rather
intuitively. Through the artistic success of Eisenstein's film the
Soviet cinema became aware of its own possibilities as a
world*wide propagandist, and from then on developed them
consciously. Even the Master himself could afford to ramble
freely within the enormous and more propaganda-conscious
concept of his masterpiece, October, only after Potemkin had
shown what could be achieved. It was this new-found aware¬
ness which introduced the milk separator as a dramatic hero,
or encouraged Dziga-Vertov to let his propagandist camera go
for a carefree stroll. Film as Art was born.

The West, too, found similar common grounds. All Quiet
on the Western Front in a way summed up the American
cinema and foreshadowed the increasing social awareness of
the Thirties. In Britain, the propagandist impulse gave the
Griersonians their vtgenerous access to the public.1’ Bunuel
made propaganda when he explored the horrors of Las Hunks.
And in the Germany of the Weimar Republic propaganda was
the essence and spice of artistic expression, through the
idealistic plea for poor Mutter Krausen , through a Brecht i an
stylisation of Rich and Poor, through the sober realism of
Westfront 1918 and the conscious message of Kameradschaft,
In Mother Russia the Dovzhenko of Earth and Ivan used
propaganda to achieve ends more personal than those desired
by the regime, but there is otherwise much to criticise or
disregard in Soviet cinema, until Chapayev found a way to
combine the useful with the truthful. In these years it really
does seem true that ™all films are propagandist,” whether
knowingly or unknowingly. The hit song in 42nd Street , *Tm
Young and Healthy, Full of Vitamin A”, was like a sad
dedication for a world running full speed towards a new war;
and the puckish ingenuity of Disney’s Three Little Pigs helped
America to confront the Big Bad Wolf of the Depression, The
artistic conscience still dared to hope that it could help,

* * +

Then comes the paradox, so sad and so revealing. Though
propaganda in the early Thirties was conscientiously aimed at
social progress, the period's crowning achievement is at once
a powerful rebuff and a Machiavellian masterpiece. With
Triumph of the Will (1934-36) education turned to deliberate
misteaching, and the whole idea of propaganda moved
towards the era of Goebbels and notoriety.

Leni Riefenstahl’s film was a diabolic combination of
reality and stylisation, Wagnerian mysticism and present-day
immediacy, beauty and threat, commanding tableaux vivants
and an overpowering urgency of movement. Above all, it was
a masterpiece of timing. What makes a propagandist film truly
great is perhaps this recognition of the right moment, the
precise point at which it can assert itself most forcefully. Miss
Riefenstahl aimed the superman idea towards that man-in-the-
street who, in a confused and disillusioned Europe, was almost
waiting for an order to obey. Propaganda had meant goodwill,
generalised humanism with all its limitations. Against this,

A\ jolson and Harry Langdon in Lewis Milestone's 11 Haileiujah , I'm a
Tramp" (1933), a comedy with music of the Depression years , set in o
community of down-ond-outs ond featuring a hit song tided "What do
you want with money".

Leni Riefenstahrs film set a firm statement, replacing doubt
by military certainty, problems and hesitations by an un¬
ambiguous exclamation mark. People who saw the film must
have felt that when those in charge were so sure about where
to put the camera, they could not but be right . . .

But Triumph of the Witt also came as a reminder that the
real propaganda film can't stand half-measures. It cannot
really afford to let us think, and is consequently a totalitarian
form of expression. After the final fadeout we are supposed to
go straight into action, to seize the nearest spade and begin
to dig (as I am always prepared to do after the tremendous last
scene of Turin's Turksib). Propaganda may have helped
Eisenstein to contribute in a general sense to the language of
the cinema, but in Triumph of the Will Miss Riefcnstahl went
right back to the core: she liberated the elemental power of
direct propaganda and crystallised its full meaning. Her film
makes everything that had gone before look merely com¬
mitted or argumentative. While making full use of Eisen-
stein’s techniques for pictorial rhythm, his flair for symbols or
the handling of crowds, she cheerfully rejects his intellectual
conscience. To hell with it! Let's have the real stuff! And
instead of the Master's sophisticated exclamation marks (put
down, one feels, with a gold-nibbed fountain-pen on fine
paper), here boots thunder out the message on the Nuremberg
pavement. (This image of marching boots, indeed* could be
taken as the trade mark of the propaganda film: it keeps
popping up regularly every ten years.) Here was sheer pagan
pomp, shorn of the ballast of humanitarian mental reserva¬
tions. Reality and symbol walk in step with each other to a
thunderous marching rhythm, and for the first time history is
used in a direct way to shape history.

Editing, too, takes on a different role. Soldiers marching
down a street may be just a bunch of men, but a film shot of
their trampling boots expresses power. So the editor doesn't
give a damn about hidden visual connections, about contrasts
or intellectual metaphors. His job is to perform a 'simple1
cheat : to make twro boots out of one, and a victorious regiment
with an ideology out of a few lines of marching soldiers. And
indeed if those boots* so irresistibly aligned by the editor’s

201

Two faces of Japan. Left: American airman faces Japanese justice in " The Purple Heart" (1944). Right: Brooklyn (Rosalind Russe//)

meets Tokyo ( Alec Guinness) in *(A Majority of One” (7961).

scissors, had marched down from the screen, Europe would
have been trampled under within a week . , .

This, then, was the ultimate : something that holds together
what has been achieved before, and finds its consummation
in a dazzling display which can lead nowhere (except to
imitation). The Triumph of the Will was really the Defeat of
our Infallibility : a symbol of how propaganda has contributed
to the natural language of the cinema and led it, simultan¬
eously, to the brink of an abyss of difficult moral questions.
* * *

The film made us aware, as nothing else could have done,
that here we have a dangerous weapon which can easily
misfire. The genie had at last escaped from the tiny bottle
and loomed over our heads, monstrous and powerful, ready
to carry out any service — if we knew how to handle it.
Intellectual and artistic conscience was bound to ask itself
whether we are masters of our own strength, or merely the
sorcerer’s troubled apprentices.

One question-mark begets another. Isn’t it opposed to the
essence of art, which searches for a universal truth, to lift out
one single, allegedly useful truth and use it perhaps to subvert
others? Is such a violent and arbitrary shaping of reality
simply immoral, a misuse of democratic ideals? Or can it,
because of its crisp immediacy, help to fertilise a vigorous,
committed form of artistic expression? Is it a good or an
unhealthy sign, for instance, that the same single image of the
Nuremberg Rally can be used by Miss Riefenstahl for agita¬
tion, then in the British Swinging the Lambeth Walk as a piece
of scathing irony; that many years later it can be applied (by
the Thorndikes, in East Germany) as Communist propaganda,
and that finally (after 27 years!) it can be used by Erwin Leiser
in an attempt at sober evaluation?

If I feel that everyone must find his own answers to such
questions, this is not an evasion. The answers depend largely
on personal judgments about aesthetics and politics, on
whether one sees art as firmly rooted in its own age or floating
in the vacuum of the absolute. The artist, we said, searches for
universal truth”— but is there any such thing? Everything
that rises to the level of artistic truth is bound also to be a
private truth, something which the artist has first recognised

for himself and to which he gives a new and personal meaning.
And who can tell, in any case, where art ends and propaganda
begins? After the war neo-realism turned a dean page, trying
to rehabilitate this whole besmirched concept, to look for the
universal truths and to assert its genuine commitments. But
again comes the question: where is the borderline between a
propagandist and a committed cinema, and does it even exist?
Whenever a cinema becomes socially conscious, sooner or
later it is bound to be transformed into propaganda. Are
O Dreamland or Los Olvidados, Father Panchali or La Terra
Trema , "only’ committed films, or do they qualify as more
direct persuasion? Commitment seems to be the word which
legitimises propaganda. But art is an outcome of an immense
will to communication. And involvement — why whitewash
it? — is propaganda.

There may be a difference, though. One may well expect
honesty from a committed artist, but not necessarily from the
maker of a direct propaganda film. The product is of too
dubious a moral value. Yet the question remains worth
asking: is it necessary for the propagandist -artist to believe in
what he or she is doing? Miss Riefenstahl has repeatedly
declared that she knew nothing about the objects of the
Nuremberg Rally film — and yet she was able to blend the
work of 120 people over a two-year creative period into a
breathtaking artistic unity. Can we believe her? Can the thing
be done by sheer talent alone? And do we have here a case of
intensified commitment or just another monumental and pain¬
fully absurd cheat? The moral wilderness of film propaganda
is certainly the worst place in which to look for artistic
absolutes. Its language has been polished through upholding
the bloodiest ideas of mankind, and it seems a fitting product
of a world in which it takes an almost physical effort to remain
neutral.

Let us grant, however, that it may be possible. And even if
all art is more or less propaganda, we can still ask in reverse
whether propaganda is art. Many people would give a negative
answer. If we do live in such circumstances, they would argue,
amidst such unstable social, moral and aesthetic values, then
that is all the more reason for the artist to remain impartial.
But for the artist to seal himself hermetically into a baroque

202

castle and float in a dream-world of the absolute seems to me
a blind, cowardly and comfortable form of self-deception.
And it strikes me as a kind of propaganda in itself— perhaps
the worst kind. It talks about an attitude which it lacks the
guts to uphold. The involved artist is concerned to strip life
bare and to take his chances; but the other will prefer to dress
up a skeleton in decorative clothing. He may find many
"absolute’ qualities in the mise en seine of Triumph of the Witt:
for him art creates its own laws and these justify its aims. But
this, it seems to me, is the attitude of the intellectual Uber-
memch . And there isn’t a baroque castle on earth, or any laws
of art, which could hold out against those marching boots.

There is a fascinating dialectic to be observed in the question
of how far propaganda is a product of its times and how far it
can influence them. Political and social circumstances may
produce an artist who exerts an influence (as Miss
Riefenstahl’s film doubtless did); the circumstances then
change, and the new situation throws up its counter-artists.
The very intensity of the propaganda genre means that it
carries its own antidotes with it, so that each period seems to
fight out its own particular battle between two different kinds
of propaganda. Early Nazi films find their opposition (only
seemingly indirect) in VEspoir or La G ramie Illusion. In the
moral wilderness there is still a continuous line pursued by the
progressive conscience: in post-war documentaries about
hunger and want ; in neo-realist films standing for basic human
rights; in the conscience of American journalistic films during
the McCarthyist era; in the intellectual ism of the French
documentarists; in the attack against old standards by the
Free Cinema group. Such continuous conflict is one of the
things that helps to keep the genre alive.

It is typical of the anarchistic rootlessness of film propa¬
ganda (and a compliment, too, to its versatility) that its
greatest works have a way of emerging from what seem to be
the least promising circumstances. Eisenstein’s intellectualism
came out of (and almost in spite of) a bloody revolution.
RiefenstahFs work emerged from (and against) the desperately
humanist atmosphere of the Thirties. And out of the Second
World War came the incarnation of the humanist artist, a poet
as noble, mature and controlled as Humphrey Jennings.

Jennings’ subjective style was perfected at precisely the
moment when the general language of the propaganda film
was at its most direct. War seems to be the test, to some extent
even the harvest, of propaganda. Both involve uncompromising
and totalitarian concepts. And to loosen up such a state of
emergency in the arts, at a time when everything is gauged to
the tight bark of a military command, is in itself an act of real
courage. But this kind of liberation, with its rejection of all
imperative symbols, was precisely the essence of Jennings’ art.
He recognised that true patriotism (and also good propaganda)
can have its roots in the conscious temper of the people rather
than the showy trappings. Riefenstahi tramples her awed
audience underfoot; Jennings lifts them up again into
humanity. Riefenstahl’s propaganda quickly exhausts the few
superficial symbols of its ideology; Jennings looks for the inner
heartbeat of his country in troop trains, factory canteens,
wheatfields, fire-stations, National Gallery concerts. At long
last propaganda was flowing again from the most intimate
beliefs and visions of an artist. Even the most stubborn purists
might be reassured that public persuasion can be an art.

For the umpteenth time in its own history alone, montage
once more takes on a different role. For the old trickery of
t w o- b oo ts-fo r- 1 he-pr ice- of- one, J enn i ngs s ubstitutes some-
thing much more flexible. Like a Debussy or a Renoir, he finds
fresh associations of pictures and sounds, discovers an airy
music of images to mirror a sea of moods, connections,
contrasts, episodes in the life of his country at war. The
historic moment creates its own symbols: a barrage balloon;

Myra Hess playing Beethoven (“German music”); the bare,
empty walls of the National Gallery. For the poet, these are
simply observations made in a particular context: nothing and
therefore everything. And perhaps this is why, once the war
was over and the intensity of the circumstances had vanished,
Jennings could never really recapture this rare poetic amalgam
of the ordinary and the extraordinary,

+ * *

Similar contradictions are apparent in the screen propa¬
ganda of the present day. As the world political climate became
more and more gloomy during the Fifties, so film propaganda
grew scared of its own power and responsibility. Soft, mild,
middle-of-the-road film-making became the style. The political
situation, fertiliser of propagandist art, was itself too desperate,
and faced with the elemental problem of sheer survival every¬
thing became ridiculously over-simplified. Symbols seem to be
produced on the assembly line, and concepts like The Bomb,
The Wall, The Button themselves neutralise any kind of
artificial symbolism which propaganda could provide. The
marching boots of the old stereotype simply can’t keep up any
longer. Nor, I think, would Jennings' gentle poetry be able to
catch up with and confront the situation. And while on the

Propaganda and war , Above: the Soviet “Battle of Stalingrad M ( 1949 ).

Right: John Huston's “The Bottle of Son Pietro” (1945).

surface things may appear to be over-simp I ified, beneath this
surface the atmosphere is more confused and complex than
ever.

The easy way is to make the most of the simplified situation
by accepting it at face value. It has become too easy for anyone
with a few sympathetically progressive ideas to become a
passionate benefactor of mankind. The Humanist tag may be
tied to a Kramer or a Chukhrai — provided it is spelled with
a capital H. Make a neutral film about the last people surviving
on earth, premiere it in a 35-nation saturation booking, and
you become the greatest prophet that money can buy. Make
afiimabout Innocent Blond Ivan caught up in the Inhumanities
of War, and you will win all the top prizes at San Francisco . . *

But perhaps we help to foster this image by ourselves
becoming gradually more and more immune to human misery.
In Japan they have made a wide-screen, colour, stereophonic
epic about the annihilation of mankind by nuclear war,
addressed (as a new type of publicity stunt) directly to Messrs.
Khrushchev and Kennedy. Even in the Thirties this could have
seemed a disturbing, thought-provoking Wellsian vision: now
we just smile at it and make a quick comment on the clumsi¬
ness of the special effects . . . And why not? We can watch the
genuine real-life horror, all the painful superlatives which our
contemporary existence can produce, at home in our slippers,
after tea. And after closc-ups of the killing at Leopoldville;
the earthquake in Iran; the public execution of a head of state
in a television studio, all laid at our feet by the unsurpassable
magic of the telephoto lens and the cathode ray tube, what
price a Las Hurdes in the cinema?

Yet here seems to be the root, and also the solution of the
problem. Great things may have become everyday things; the
capital letters may have been hacked to death. Isn’t this, then,
the precise moment when an artist should step in, should
reassess the bloated and overworked concepts by subjecting
them to his own personal viewpoint, treating them with that
indefinable plus quality that only an artist can contribute ? It is
impossible to intensify the exclamation mark slammed down
by a single shot of a heap of human hair at Auschwitz — but
at the same time it can be intensified into a Nuit et Brouillard.
By just look ing around “you have seen nothing at Hiroshima”
—and that is why Resnais strove for and achieved so much
more than that. This is the way FranjiTs Hotel des Imalides
attacked, and Biinuef, Ichikawa, Two Men and a Wardrobe,
Vivret Aetna Tilt and many others.

True, it is a question whether this long overdue invasion of
conscience, and the return to an Eisensteinian intellectual
humanism, may bring death or regeneration to this funda¬
mentally totalitarian form of expression. A few years ago many
devotees of the genre praised to the skies the effective Com¬
munist propaganda films made in East Germany by the
Thorndikes, Perhaps they seemed like the last of the Mohicans:
the defenders of the “real stuff”* But, I feel, the quieter,
sometimes hesitant voice of awakening conscience means
much more now than a few smart pranks with the editor’s
scissors or some bombastically effective pictorial harangue.

Perhaps the whole concept of film propaganda, in itself and
in relation to its audience, will soon have to be reassessed*
Films by Chris Marker and Jean Rouch illustrate the close
links with television, but also the film’s own superiority to it.
In these works, at long last, propaganda is being written in
lower case rather than in the old capital letters. And at a time
when history so visibly outruns us, is formed, reformed and
indeed deformed before our eyes, the real aim of propaganda
ought to be to determine (and no longer to confuse) the place
and role of human beings in our topsy-turvy universe. It’s in
this way that the genre could be rehabilitated.

But in the meantime there is something we can benefit from
right now. If propaganda, with all its dangers, reminds us of
the need to face up to the world we live in, urges us not to
remain neutral but to try to adopt a standpoint, then let it
come. It will help us to build up our own resistance. After all,
it was we who allowed ourselves to be cheated.

BOOK

REVIEWS

EISENSTEIN DRAWINGS, introductory text by Y. Pimenov.
(Isskustvo, Moscow*)

eisenstein’s drawings are oddly reminiscent of Toulouse
Lautrec’s, chiefly in that he used the characters and atmosphere of
the theatre and the circus, an artificial situation, to show what is
grotesque in the real. But Toulouse Lautree went no further than
the image which itself contained his thought, while to Eisenstein the
drawing was but the beginning of his thought which went further
than and beyond the drawing.

Eisenstein began to draw seriously at an early age: his work was
at no time mere pencil doodlings or notes of casual impressions; in
each drawing there was a purpose, and he called them his 'visual
reports in shorthand’. In the days of the February Revolution he
started to do caricatures, two of which appeared in a Petersburg
daily paper over the unusual signature of 'Sir Gay’, which was in
fact a play on his Russian name Sergey.

First working in the theatre, he used watercolours for his sketches
which for some reason had an inhibiting effect upon his originality;
but in 1924 he firmly established himself as an artist in cinema and
by then his drawings were much more mature: he had learned to
'pitch his vision’, in Serov's phrase, which he was so fond of quoting.
He would enjoy drawing any number of versions of a psychological
situation which interested him: when he was ill in Mexico he did
120 drawings illustrating the murder of Duncan by Macbeth.
Another favourite theme is that of patient and doctor, of which
there are many examples in this book*

When lecturing to his students on the art of the cinema, he would
say of drawing: “To get your effect, you need not draw every detail
of a face: one eye wide open, the mouth pursed into a small G, or
again, an eye cast down -there are three essential indices by which
a face can become fully expressive.”

Every art, he said, tried to go beyond its bounds, to go beyond
realism. Every art had to have its original method, its own aesthetic.
Cinema was to be the outlet for all the other arts, the next step which
they could take. Sculpture comprised the spirit of construction
including the static form of the human body. Painting was also
static, but painting could also draw upon the world for its back¬
ground.

Perhaps the turning point of his life was at the age of nineteen
when he became convinced of his affinity with Leonardo, whose
visions were doomed to he unrealised because of their magnitude.
On the other hand, Eisenstein’s ability to put his ideas into visual
form was balanced by an intense analytical energy. His intellectual
curiosity led him into unexpected places: for example, he set himself
to explore the nature of the Japanese language and to learn three
hundred ideograms. He became obsessed with hieroglyphics, and
later this was to serve him as a corner-stone for the film technique
of montage.

Eisenstein discovered the power of the cut, the montage -the
synthesis when two pieces oF film, two scenes, are spliced together,
A new meaning is created, one that did not of necessity exist in any
single cut used. He called it “the synthesis of the cut”. By cutting
together scenes wfhich he felt belonged together, either for the idea
or for the visual content, or by repeating an idea or visual image
a number of times, he discovered that the emotional impact on the
viewer is enormous; indeed, more effective than any other medium
of art or communication.

To a great extent, the technique of montage utilises the cartoon¬
ist’s weapon of sarcasm and irony, but much more effectively, for
the following reasons. First, in film, one has a completely captive
audience; and second, through cutting, the irony can be greatly
multiplied. For instance : the portrait of a well-fed bourgeois playing
with his fork as he eats from a lavishly burdened table is greatly
intensified by the scene that follows, showing a starving worker
searching for food in a garbage can, and using the same movements

204

as the well-fed man with the fork. You can find another illustration
in Eisenstein's film Strike, in which a group of striking workers are
shot down by a contingent of Cossacks, This shot is followed by
a scene showing the slaughter of an ox by a butcher. Naturally, this
is much more effective propaganda than a still cartoon.

This book represents his wonderful variety of subject and
imagination: his fantasies on classical, mythological themes
(Orestes revenging himself for his father's murder, the blind Oedipus*
Apollo caressing a leopard, a faun playing the flute); his portraits
of artists in which he somehow incorporates the atmosphere of their
art: for example, looking at that of Bach, the picture of a man of
the 18th century with stem and concentrated features, one seems to
hear the playing of an organ. The drawing of Maurice Maeterlinck
is unrealistic* the subject's features are not there; instead, there is a
blurred, shapeless being* sexless and ageless, rounded and vague—
presumably representing Eisenstein's image of the decadent sym¬
bolism of the philosopher-author of The Blue Bird. He sees in Ibsen
the doctrinaire preacher moralising upon the fate of his heroes.

But his drawing of Daumier as a figure swept off in a whirlwind,
though no portrait* wonderfully reveals his admiration for this
artist, the 'Michelangelo of the caricature'* He considered Daumier
to be the forerunner of the art of the cinema, because of his ability
to draw the different parts of the human body at different stages of
movement. We find the same dynamic process in his own sketches
for Alexander Nevsky and Ivan The Terrible.

His vision of tragedy can be seen in the sinister drawing of
Richard 111, where one's attention is immediately drawn to the
expression of the face with its gloomy line of eyebrows dark above
the thin, long nose, and the steel-like muscles of the neck* As for
comedy, Eisenstein was deeply involved in the problem of comedy
in art. “The laughter of destruction is close to my heart,” he wrote.
“The destructive hissing of the pamphlet"

Eiscnstcin always put down in graphic form the film he was about
to make, both pen and pencil in hand and alternating them feverish¬
ly* The pen would start the drawing, while the pencil would
hurriedly write down the dialogue. This was valuable for the actors
as well as for all the other participants in the film* Before writing the
score of Alexander Nevsky, we learn that Prokofief insisted upon
seeing Eisenstein’s sketches. They were not dogmatic, they were not
intended to be slavishly followed, but they did represent the skeleton
of the story* the vision, “A hint, drawn on a scrap of paper, some¬
times reaches the screen, sometimes it goes astray. At times it
changes shape when it encounters an unpredictable actor, or it is
met by lighting of an unexpected kind, or faces other unforeseen
circumstances."

The Ice Battle in Alexander Nevsky was shot in 1938 in the studio
of Mosfilm, in July, during a torrid heat wave. This is evidence of
the unswerving character of the director, as well as of the meticulous
preliminary work he had done beforehand. He himself said after¬
wards: “We pulled off the make-believe winter. The reason for its
success is that we did not try to fake a winter, nor to deceive people
with artificial icicles and other items* We only borrowed from the
winter its light and sound effects: the whiteness of the ground and
the darkness of the sky* Winter was present at the battle in the
measure in which it could not be distinguished from a genuine one."

Eisenstein's genius for capturing on paper in advance the essen¬
tials of a film makes us all the more eager to see, after the publication
of these drawings, the several thousands of further drawings still
hidden away in their folders*

Moura Budberq

THE INNOCENT EYE: The life of Robert J* Flaherty* By
Arthur Calder-Marshall, based on research material by Pa til
Rotha and Basil Wright, illustrated, (W. H. Allen, Loudon, 42s,)

for SEVERAL years after Flaherty's death in 1951 , Paul Rotha and
Basil Wright collected and collated research material for a “bio¬
graphical film history" of the man and his work. Their completed
typescript is now in the Museum of Modern Art Film Library in
New York, but the publishers who original ly commissioned the
work, and W. H. Allen who have now presented it* both felt that in
its original form its interest was too restricted and that it should be
re-designed to appeal to a wider public. The rewriting was eventually
undertaken by Arthur Calder- Marshall, who makes it clear in his
preface that the conclusions reached are his own and that they do
not in every case agree with those of Rotha and Wright*

The early chapters are concerned with Flaherty's work as an
explorer in the Canadian arctic and they make excellent use of his
own vivid writings on the subject. It was his youthful experience as
a prospector, growing to know and admire the Eskimo way of life,
which was to become the almost accidental basis of his film-making.

An Eisenstein seif-portrait An exhibition of his drawings and manu¬
scripts, sponsored by the Friends of the National Film Archive, can be
seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum until November /Oth.

Rotha is credited with the idea that the whole pattern of his intuitive
approach to film can be traced to his understanding of Eskimo art*
As the Eskimo carver waits for a seal or a bear to emerge from the
ivory, releasing what is already there rather than creating a new
form, so Flaherty watched and waited with monumental patience
until he recognised on the screen the shape of an idea he had
conceived deep in his unconscious. It was a slow and often a very
wasteful method, maddening to professionals who collaborated on
his later work, and probably increased his difficulties in finding
commercial sponsorship. But it was the only way he could work*
and attempts to impose a more organised or economical system
always came to grief.

The remainder of the book* sub-titled *4 Flaherty the artist,” con¬
centrates on the creative processes rather than on biographical detail*
so that what emerges is a long and detailed study of the films rather
than an account of the man and his life, This was perhaps inevitable
as Calder- Marsha 11 has no personal knowledge of Flaherty (they met
only once* at a party); but he is able to view the legend from a
comparatively detached viewpoint and he deliberately refrains from
repeating the many apocryphal tales that have gathered round
Flaherty's memory* There is nothing detached, however, about his
attitude to the films. I le is a wholehearted fan, and one feels at limes
that his enthusiasm leads him into praising Flaherty at the expense
of other documentarists such as Grierson who had different aims.
Writing for instance of the potter sequence in industrial Britain he
says:

"One sees at this single point at which their work crossed the
fundamental division between the two men, Flaherty's
individual quest for the long truth and Griei^on’s for the
brief progressive one. Grierson had an articulate social
philosophy. Flaherty had an inarticulate human love. The
two met in the potter's hand and face, but began to diverge
in what was made of them.”

The implication that Flaherty's was the higher concern is hard to
accept, especially for those of us who found his romanticism more
picturesque than truthful. But have we perhaps been judging a poet
by the standards of social realism? Calder-Marshall is persuasive
enough to make one want to reconsider and especially to see the key
film The Land , which Grierson holds to be the greatest he ever made.

205

Grierson himself, of course, never wavered in his loyalty to Flaherty,
even when their paths were most divergent. The way in which he and
the other British documentarists rallied again and again to his
defence is one of the most heartening lessons the book has to teach
Nevertheless it is hard to understand what audience the publishers
are hoping to reach. Though the first part, “Flaherty the explorer,"
is of fairly general interest, the rest will appeal mainly to readers
already familiar with the films. In which case it docs seem a pity,
readable though the present text is, that so much of the original
research material has not seen the light of day. As it is, the appen¬
dices by Rotha and Wright, consisting of a synopsis of each film
and an admirably accurate filmography, are valuable for reference,
and so is the efficient index. The stills have been chosen with a
splendidly sympathetic eye to illustrate the spirit of the films,

Brenda Davies

BOOKS RECEIVED

the art of the film By Ernest Lindgren. (Allen and Unwin, 30s.)
Revised and enlarged edition of the book first published in 1948,
classics of the FOREIGN film; a pictorial treasury. By Parker Tyler,
(Citadel Press, New York, $8.50,)

single bed for three: a Lawrence of Arabia notebook. By Howard
Kent, (Hutchinson, 25s.)

FLAVOUR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE

confirmed from page 186

suddenly emerges to take a major role in the dim, roundly
telling off the matchmakers for their shady dealings, and
rather unconvincingly becoming the mother's mainstay
against loneliness by visiting her regularly after the daughter's
marriage. In Late Spring, on the other hand, every character
and every scene is perfectly integrated in the main theme
(not a father's loneliness as in Autumn Afternoon , but rather a
daughter's reconciliation to the idea of marriage), and the
character of the daughter's friend is carefully established so
that her final offer of friendship to the father is completely
and convincingly in character.

The integration of character and incident is so exact
throughout the film that it is one of his great masterpieces,
and the sequence in which father and daughter make a last
trip together to Kyoto before her marriage is probably one
of the most perfect in Ozu's work. At the end of their visit,
the daughter, realising that this is their last trip together,
becomes afraid; he calms her, and they go to bed. As they
talk peacefully in the dark, the father falls asleep, and the
camera cuts from a close-up of the daughter's face, now
tranquil, to a shot of a single vase framed in the window.
The image is one of perfect elegiac beauty, carried over in
the following sequence (the father and an elderly friend
sitting next morning in the calm of a ruined temple yard,
talking of the pain of raising children only to watch them
grow away), to the scene back in Tokyo, preparing for the
wedding, when the father sinks to his knees in wonder at the
beauty of his daughter in her wedding-dress. By comparison,
the Late Autumn remake gives short change indeed* with a
rather perfunctory conversation between mother and
daughter on their last trip, and then, quite simply, a con¬
ventional studio photograph of bride and groom in their
wedding clothes. It is as though Oxu, because it was a remake
of a subject he had already explored, used bits and pieces
without ever becoming involved.

Late Autumn , in fact, like Good Morning and like Early
Spring, has no true centre, and therefore no dynamic growth;
the sum of its scenes adds up to no more than the sum of its
scenes. In the great films, on the other hand — Late Spring ,
Tokyo Story , An Autumn Afternoon — there is a subtle Ozu
alchemy whereby the separate elements expand and coalesce
to form a perfect whole. At the end of Tokyo Story , the old
man mourning for his wife walks out on the terrace in the
early morning. “It was a beautiful sunrise,” he says quietly.
“I think we're going to have another hot day,” This is the
point to which the entire film has been moving: it is a sum¬
mation of experience.

CORRESPONDENCE

Cinema-Verite

The Editor, sight and sound

Sir,— Louis Marcorelles’ article in the Summer issue of sight and
sound on the latest in cinema-verite is a noteworthy example of how
illusive truth can be. I was present at the Unesco Film Club
showing of The Showman and La P unit ion at which Roberto
Rossellini spoke, and in my opinion his remarks were inspired
rather than (as Mr. Marcorelles wrote) “aggressive”.

“Why did you make the film?” Rossellini asked the Maysles
brothers after seeing The Showman, and after explaining that he did
not wish to be rude but sincerely wanted to know whether they
considered themselves artists (in pursuit of Cinema) or scientific
researchers (in pursuit of Truth). In this context AI Maysles’ reply
(“We just like to make movies”) seems sophomorish rather than
“splendid”.

Following La P uni don and Roach’s explanation that he had shot
the entire one-hour film in two days, without a prepared script or
treatment, with untrained actors, without rehearsals, giving little or
no direction, etc., etc., Rossellini made these comments: “I have
more confidence in you* Jean, than you have in yourself ... 1 refuse
to believe that you have so few talents . . . Next time I want to see
a film that you do make, not one that you not-make.” And he
concluded that there wasn’t anything wrong with cinema-viritg that
couldn’t be cured by a little hard work. “The problem with you
people is this/’ Rossellini said, as if he knew what he was talking
about, “—you're just lazy."

This is the truth. Maybe not the whole truth, and certainly not
“Nothing but the Truth” (as Mr. Marcorelles recorded it), but it is
the truth as 1 beard it, as 1 remember it, and as 1 like to tell it.

Yours faithfully,

Paris* 7. Cecils Starr

Subsidy in Italy

Sir, — In the Spring number of your journal, towards the end of
The Front Page, you say; “We have asked our film-makers often
enough why they can’t be Antonioni or Olmi, Resnais or Truffaut”

May I suggest that if you wanted to give your readers some sort
of answer to the question as far as Italy is concerned, it would be
very much to the point to give them the full story of state subsidy in
this country: of how all political parties have since the war regarded
the film and television industries as important instruments of
national and international public relations, that post-war American
term for propaganda, in a country still ridden with mental reserve
on the question of national unity and with various complexes in the
international field.

It is not generally known that the Italian state is even in trouble
with the Common Market authorities under Article 92 of the Rome
Treaty for excessive subsidisation of films.

Is it not going too far to suggest by implication that similar
security of office would not bring forth a mushroom growth of
British film directors?

Yours faithfully,

Milan. Nicholas M. Carroll

Distribution U.3.A,

Sir,— Just the mention of the term “film distribution” is likely to
make a film addict’s blood boil, especially in the United States.
Below are a few reasons why.

A New York filmgoer looking in his newspaper for the newly
released foreign films would find: The Trial , Sanjuro , The Bad Sleep
Welt , The Idiot , Winter Light * Le Amkhe, II Grido , Le Caporal
Ep ingle b Paris Nous Appartient, The Eclipse, Pickpocket, Love at 20 ,
and most recently 11 Posto. But all of these are not new. Le Amkhe ,
// Grido , The Idiot — the presence of these can be explained by the
interest in the early work of Antonioni and Kurosawa, just as a
similar interest saw the arrival of the early Bergman films a few
years ago. But what of Paris Nous Appartient and Pickpocket? Both
were released several years ago in Europe. This makes one wonder
which films made within the last year we will have to wait several
more years to sec. And which will we never see at all?

Another aspect of distribution (though somewhat less infuriating)
is the change of titles which some films undergo. Two classic

20 6

examples are Los Ofvidados and / Vitelkmi, which became The Young
and the Damned arid The Young and the Passionate respectively.
Others, within the last few years, are: Persons Unknown to Big Deal
on Madonna Street; Ascenseur pour VEchafaud to Frantic; Sait-on
jamais? [When the Devil Drives) to No Sun in Yen ice; The Loneliness
of the Long Distance Runner to Rebel with a Cause (only in some
parts of the country, notably Chicago); and 11 Posto to The Sound
of Trumpets,

A short time ago I went to Chicago (a distance of 100 miles) to sec
The Eclipse and II Grido {The Outcry), 11 Grido turned out to be not
// Grido but an Italian film of 1946 known as Outcry — and the
theatre manager was unaware that he was showing the wrong film.
Furthermore* The Eclipse had been cut over 20 minutes. The abstract
shots from the final sequence were missing (all that remained were
two shots lasting approximately ten seconds); the initial scene was
only one-third its original length; missing entirely was the sequence
in the deserted street with the dogs; missing also were many shots
which established the final sequence. However, a scene which had
been cut from the print I had seen some months before was intact.

And such is the state of affairs of film distribution, . .

Yours faithfully,

Janesville, Brian Scobie

Wisconsin.

Correction — Work in Progress

SlR,— Just for the record, Nothing But the Best is produced by
Domino Productions Limited for world distribution by Anglo
Amalgamated Film Distributors; and released in the United
Kingdom through Warner-Pathe*

Yours faithfully,

London, W.L David Deutsch

Ad mi r ado res

Sir, — We put in your knowledge that from the day 5th November
of 1962* function in the city of Rosario, Argentina, the dub of Fans
of Dirk Bogarde, club are constitute for a group fanatic and admirer
of the grand English artist this club whose mission principal is to
distribute photograph.

We want to invite to Dirk Bogarde’s English Fans, that wish to
belong to the club they can solicit associated cards completely free;
they must send us their name and address, no more,

Our dub has fellows all through America and Spain, too. It has
distributed more of 14,000 actor’s photos free, between the solicitors,
we have made many radio competitions and by press too, about
his films, and the results of the last of them about which were the
films people prefer were : (1) Victim , (2) The Wind Cannot Read ,
(3) Libel, (4) The Spanish Gardener , (5) The Angei Wore Red ,

From the first days of the club, in November 1962, it has con¬
trolled together with Rank’s, Columbia’s and Metro’s about the
number of days in which Bogarde’s films have been exhibited and:
Rank’s by 168 days, Columbia 48 and Metro’s 30 (246 days in
general since May 5th). In this time seven city’s cinemas had
dedicated completely programmes to this actor.

We salute you affectionately and we wish you a lot of future exits.

Yours faithfully,

Club Admiradores de Dirk Bogarde, Nelly Miguel
Suipaeha J 135,

Rosario de Sta* Fe,

Argentina.

GREAT FILMS -

Film societies look to Trans-World for film classics

• BILL OF DIVORCEMENT— Katharine

Hepburn, John Barrymore

• MALE ANIMAL— Comedy

• TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE— Walter

Huston

0 MALTESE FALCON — Humphrey Bogart,

Peter Lorre

• I’M ALL RIGHT JACK— Peter Sellers
Write for catalog of US and foreign features and shorts

TRANS-WORLD FILMS, inc.

332 $* Michigan Ave,, Dept. SS# Chicago 4, Illinois*

THE FESTIVALS: TRIESTE
continued from page 179

Trnka’s ingenious The Cybernetic Grandmother was the only
short of merit; and the Trieste world premiere of Roger
Corman’s X— -The Matt with the X-Ray Eyes proved something
of a dud. American-Intemational’s most ambitious production
to date, it is concerned with the tribulations of Dr. Xavier
(Ray Milland), discoverer of a radio-active serum by which
his eyes are turned into X-rays and his life into hell* He can
spot tumours inside fully-dressed patients, see through
women’s evening gowns and win a fortune at Las Vegas — but
he soon goes completely daft from the strain* Floyd Crosby’s
camera supplies some pretty tricks, but the film falls flat,
largely because of lack of vision on the director’s part. A group
of French cinephiles has recently attempted to recruit Corrnan
as a new cult director; but the game just can’t be played* Here
he actually exemplifies what is most debilitating at the heart
of the current crop of opportunistic SF and terror films: an
antiseptic and unpoetic approach to material which cries out
for imagination and tremulous involvement,

I was quite excited by Trieste — more than most of those
present — though the level of most of the other films was barely
ankle-high. Yet Ikaria alone is solid enough proof that adult
SF films can be made ; and in another direction Klouchantzev’s
Planet of Tempests, an extraordinary new Russian space
adventure (inexplicably not sent to Trieste) is proof that Flash
Gordon is still very much alive and kicking* But next year
Trieste will have to cast its nets both wider and farther back.
Rather than programming, in competition, films both mediocre
and several years old ( Masters of Venus , Attack of the Puppet
People), we should be given non-competitive surveys of classics
in the genre* And next year there must be a batch of entries
from that country where the general quality of SF cinema is
currently highest — Japan*

Elliott Stein

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WARNER- PATH E for The Servant, Billy Liar, A Majority of One, Strangers on
a Train, The Raven.

PARAMOUNT PICTURES for Seven Days in May, The Trouble with Harry
Rear Window.

UNITED ARTISTS for Ifs a Mad , Mad, Mad , Mad World t Lilies of the field.
20lh CENTURY-FOX for The Purple Heart .

RANK FILM DISTRIBUTORS for The Birds, The Man Who Knew Too Much,
Freud — The Secret Passion.

BLC/BRITISH LION for David and Lisa, Sammy Going South.

GALA FILM DISTRIBUTORS for Eve, Piel de Terano, The Battle of Stalingrad.
ACADEMY CINEMA for l* Petit Soldat.

CONTEMPORARY FILMS for Paris Nous Apparent.

SEBRICON for Le Rendezvous de Minuif.

TROY-SCHENCK PRODUCTIONS for Psyche 59.

HAL WALLIS-KEEP FILMS for Becket.

SHOCHIKU PRODUCTIONS for Tokyo Story, Good Morning, late Autumn (
An Autumn Afternoon ,

ROME PARIS FILMS for Le Mepris.

ARGOS FILMS for Muriel.

VOX T1TANUS/M ARCEAU/COCINOR for ff Demonic .

FILM POLSKi-M 1 N 1 ATU RE STUDIOS for Labyrinth,

CZECHOSLOVAK STATE FILM for Ikaria XBl.

SOVEXPORT FILM for Childhood of Ivan, Nine Days of One Year.

CAHIERS DU CINEMA/LOUIS MARCORELLES for photograph of Jacques

Rive tic.

L.P.C./CAHIERS DU CINEMA forte Derniires Vactmces.

AGENCE DE PRESSE BERNAND for La Religieuse.

LES FILMS ROGER LEENHARDT/LOUIS MARCORELLES for photograph
of Roger Lconhardt.

NATIONAL FILM ARCHIVE for Diary for Timothy , Triumph of the Will,
Hallelujah, Pm a Tramp , Battle of San Pietro.

CORRESPONDENTS

HOLLYWOOD: Albert Johnson SCANDINAVIA : Ailo Makinen

NEW YORK: Cecils Starr SPAIN & PORTUGAL: Francisco Aranda

ITALY: Giulio Cesar c Castello POLAND: Bpleslaw Michalek

FRANCE; Louis Marcordlts

SOLE AGENTS for U.S*A*; Eastern News Distributors, 255 Seventh Avenue,
New York 1, N.Y.

PRINTED BY Brown. Knight & Truseott Ltd., London, England,

BLOCKS BY W. F. Sedgwick Ltd.* London.

ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION RATES (4 issues), 18s. including postage*

UJ3.A.; $3.50. Price per copy in United States, 35 cents.

PUBLICATION DATES: 1st January. 1st April, 1st July, and 1st October*
Overseas Editions: I2th of these months.

207

A GUIDE TO CURRENT FILMS

Films of special interest to SIGHT AND SOUND readers are denoted by one , two, three or four stars

** ANGEL BABY (Crusader) The dash of sex and evangelism in Baby Doll
country. Crisp, intelligent and compact, beautifully acted by Mercedes
McCambridge and newcomer Salom£ Jens* (George Hamilton* Joan Blnndell;
director* Paul Wendkos.)

•♦BILLY LIAR ( Warncr-Pathe) Adaptation by Waterhouse and Halt of their
own play about Billy Fisher, undertaker’s clerk, fantasist and born Liar.
Always energetic, often very funny, and compelling acted by Tom Courtenay
and Julie Christie, (Wilfred Pickles; director* John Schlesinger, 'Scope.)
Reviewed.

•♦♦BIRDS* THE (Rank) Hitchcock’s doomsday fantasy about the day the birds
hit back at the humans at Bodega Bay. Neat build-up and some masterly
sequences of claustrophobic tension, though the trick work gets in the way of
any very prolonged suspension of disbelief (Tippi Hedrcn* Rod Taylor,
Jessica Tandy, Technicolor.)

CLEOPATRA (Fa*) The film which makes it all too apparent that with £14
million, any amount of assorted talent, extra vagant Locations, and a plot-line
sanctified by Shaw and Shakespeare, it's still possible to make a pretty dull
movie. (Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Rex Harrison; director, Joseph L.
Mankicwicz. DeLuxe Color, Todd-AO), Reviewed.

CONDEMNED OF ALTONA* THE (Fox) Hopelessly miscast and mis¬
directed travesty of Sartre's very considerable play about post-war guilt and
responsibility* Only Fredric March and Franqoise Provost, as the German
shipping magnate and his tormented daughter, keep their heads above water,
(Sophia Loren, Maximilian Schell, Robert Wagner; director, Vittorio De
Sica.)

DR. CRIP PEN (Warner- PatM) Plodding account of the sad little wife-
murderer. hovering uneasily between courtroom and flashback. The acting,
particularly by Coral Browne as the unfortunate Belle, is far superior to
anything else* (Donald Pleasence, Samantha Eggar; director, Robert Lynn.)

■ ***84 (Gala) Fellini's film, as autobiographical as you care to read it, about the
life and times, memories and desires, of a Roman film-maker. An extra¬
ordinary tour round an artist's mind, photographed with stunning virtuosity
by Gianni Da Venanzo. (Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk
AimAe+) Reviewed,

*EVE (Gala) A thoroughly splendid Jeanne Moreau teases, titillates and
torments poor Stanley Baker into a grovelling wreck in Gianni Di Venanzo ’s
beautifully photographed Venice. Many brilliant flashes in an uneasy
coalition between The Blue Angela La Dolce Vita and The Bible. (Virna List,
Giorgio Alberiazzi; director, Joseph Lossy) Reviewed.

*55 DAYS AT PEKING (Rank) Story of the Boxer Rebellion and siege of the
Peking legations, rethought by Samuel li roust on, Nicholas Ray and Philip
Yordan as a U,N* allegory* Chinese court and British embassy share the
English actors; Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner stand in for the great
powers. Fine fireworks, (David Niven, Flora Robson, Techmcolor*Technirama
70.)

FOR LOVE OR MONEY (Rank) Kirk Douglas as a San Francisco lawyer
hired by a rich widow as matchmaker for her three daughters. Rather lacka¬
daisical comedy, nowhere near as bright and shiny as it would like to be. (Milzi
Gaynor, Gig Young, Thelma Ritter; director, Michael Gordon, Technicolor
Print.)

♦FOUR DAYS OF NAPLES, THE (Gala) Nanni Loy+s tribute to the Neapoli¬
tans who rose against their German occupiers looks very authentic In the long
shot battles but holds its personal anecdotes down to the level of heroic
cliches. Outstanding camerawork by Marcello Gatti (Lea Massari, Frank
Wolff, Georges Wilson.) Revie wed.

* FREUD; THE SECRET PASSION (Rank) Everything considered, a fairly
sober and occasionally perceptive account of the Master's life, though the
dream sequences are as absurd as usual. Montgomery Clift gives a monotonous,
staring-eyed performance as Freud himself, (Larry Parks, Susannah York;
director, John Huston*) Reviewed.

GATHERING OF EAGLES* A (Rank) Life on a Strategic Air Command
base* with the usual martinet commander who neglects his wife in the interests
of operational efficiency. Also as usual, the aircraft come off better than the
people. (Rock Hudson, Mary Peach, Rod Taylor; director* Delbert Mann.
Eastman Colour.)

GAY PURR-EE ( Warner- Pa tin?) Full-length UFA cat cartoon, with simple
Mewsette rescued by honest Jaime Tom from the clutches of wily schemers
Meowrice and Mme, Rubens-Chatle. Some pastiche effects (Lautrec, Van
Gogh, etc,), and Judy Garland and Hcrrmonc G ingold on the sound track*
but design and cat-characterisation both sketchy. (Director, Abe Levitow,
Technicolor.)

*HOW THE WEST WAS WON (A f-G-MjCtnerama) Bulging with stars and
shivering at the seams* the first Cinerama story film mixes eye-catching
spectacle with slabs of static narrative. Ford's Civil War sequence comes
closest to taming the giant screen. (Debbie Reynolds, James Stewart, Carroll
Baker; directors, Henry Hathaway, John Ford, George Marshall. Techni¬
color.)

♦♦LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (BLCf Columbia) David Lean, Sam Spiegel and
Robert Boll's massive reconstruction of the desert campaigns. Impeccably
academic direction and a genuine response to the setting, but the whole thing
has rather the air of a blockbuster in search of a hero. (Peter 0*Toole, Alec
Guinness* Jack Hawkins, Anthony Quinn. Technicolor* Super Panavision
70.)

MR. ROBERTS (Warner- Path^) Reissue of the 1955 comedy* begun by Ford
and finished by Mervyn LeRoy, about life aboard a U.S. supply ship. Stylish
playing from Henry Fonda and Jack Lemmon; jokes and sentiments faithfully
reproduced from the stage original. (James Cagney, William Powell: Warner-
color, CinemaScope,)

•MISTRESS* THE (Gaia) Vilgot Sjoman's first film as director takes a cool
look at a young girl’s Lor Lured relationship with Lwo lovers* with acknowledg¬
ments to Bergman and the NouvcJle Vague, Several perceptive scenes;
atmosphere overworks the elusive and elliptical. (Bibi Andersson* Max von
Sydow, Per Myrberg.)

•***N AZARIN (Contemporary) Re- viewed, Bunucl's account of a young Mexican
priest’s attempt to live as a modern Christ retains its ferocious power. Only
a clumsy opening, and Figueroa's occasionally bloated camerawork, prevent
it from achieving the perfection of Vir Uliana and The Exterminating Angel.
(Francisco Rabal, Marga Lopez, Rita Macedo.) Reviewed.

••NUTTY PROFESSOR, THE (Paramount) Jerry Lewis as a timid college
professor transformed by a Jekyll and Hyde potion into a pop-singing teenage
idol. Inventive and very funny, particularly in its early scenes, though it runs
out of steam after the halfway mark, (Stella Stevens: director, Jerry Lewis.
Technicolor.)

PRESSURE POINT (United Artists) Case history of an American fascist,
as revealed through his relations with a Negro psychiatrist, A Stanley Kramer
production, blazing with honourable intentions, but too stilted and melo¬
dramatic to make more than a few elementary points, (Sidney Poitier, Bobby
Darin; director, Hubert Cornfield.)

•RAVEN, THE ( Warner-Pathe) Roger Corman’s most whole-hearted send-up
of his own Poe cycle. Sadly, the witty script sags in the middle, but Price,
Karloff and Lorre have the time of their lives as a trio of 1 5th century magicians
pitting their powers against each other. (Hazel Court, PathGcoIor, Panavision.)
Reviewed.

RUNNING MAN, THE (BLCf Columbia) Thriller about an insurance fraud,
which sends Laurence Harvey chasing around Spain in whiskery disguise as
an Australian sheep farmer. Chief mystery is Carol Reed's failure to make a
tolerable adventure more than rudimcntarily exciting. (Lee Remick, Alan
Bates. Technicolor, Fanavision.)

•STATION SIX SAHARA (BLCfBritish Lion) Glowering melodrama about
the uproar caused at a remote pipe-line station by the arrival of Carroll
Baker. Seth Holt directs for tension, with plenty of sweating close-ups;
Peter van Eyck supplies the Teutonic Sturm und Drang. (Ian Bannen,
Denholm Elliott.)

•STUDS LONIGAN ( United Artists) Ambitious adaptation of James Farrell’s
novel* strong on Twenties atmosphere and directed with feeling* Unhappily,
production difficulties and a laborious central performance take the cdgeoJf it.
(Christopher Knight* Venetia Stevenson, Frank Garshin; director, Irving
Lerner.)

•TOM JONES {United Artists) Hit-or-miss rendering of Fielding’s novel as a
jolly cavalcade of 18th century bosoms and bawdry. Energetically undisciplined
but intermittently salvaged by its actors* led by a magnificent Edith Evans.
(Albert Finney* Susannah York, Hugh Griffith, Joan Greenwood; director,
Tony Richardson. Eastman Colour.)

UGLY AMERICAN, THE (Rank) Marlon Brando as U.S. ambassador to a
South East Asian state, who finally learns the difference between neutralist
(by now pro-American, and dead) and Communist, Politically naive fable*
often disconcertingly off target* (Eiji Okada, Pat H ingle; director* George
Englund. Technicolor Print.)

VICE AND VIRTUE (Gaia) Vadim reaches the lower depths in a raving
adaptation from the Marquis de Sade, festooned with Gestapo uniforms,
vestal Virgins, Awful Fates, and Wagner on the sound track. (Annie
Girardot* Robert H ossein* Catherine Deneuve. Franscope.)

V.LP.s* THE (M-G-M) All-star entertainment, with Asquith in full command
of his cast, and Terence Rattigan supplying the smooth and predictable
screenplay. Plot is a series of anecdotes about airline passengers delayed by
Tog, (Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Orson Welles. Eastman Colour*
Fanavision*)

•WAR HUNT (United Artists ) Downbeat story of a psychotic war lover in
Korea. Uneven direction of the players, and a narrative which can’t sustain its
rip* though the war scenes are appropriately stark and frightening. (John
axon, Robert Redford, Charles Aidman; director, Denis Sanders.)

•♦WEST SIDE STORY (United Artists) Strikingly mounted version, of the
Broadway musical which Fails to bridge the gap between realistic backgrounds
and Hollywood social rage, between dramatic dancing and tired echoes of
Romeo and Juliet. Fine playing by George Chakiris, Richard Beymer and
Rita Moreno. (Natalie Wood, RussTamblyn; directors* Robert Wise, Jerome
Robbins* Technicolor* Fanavision 70.)

WIVES AND LOVERS (Paramount) Cautionary laic about a best-selling
novelist whose venture into expense account high-life goes to his head. Would-
be sophisticated comedy, with any amount of martini-mixing and Broadway
name-dropping; sterling performance by Shelley Winters as wisccracker- in-
chief* (Janet Leigh, Van Johnson; director* John Rich.)

WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM, THE (M-G-M/
Cinerama) Heavily played by Laurence Harvey and Carl Boehm, the inventive
brothers become lost in the Hollywood schmaltz, lightened by flashes of wit
in the fairy tales and by Manila Hunt's glowing witch-lady. (Claire Bloom*
Yvette Mimieux; directors* Henry Levin, George Pal. Technicolor* Cinerama,)

208

ANNOUNCING

the seventh
london
him festival

BOX OFFICE OPENS 5TH OCTOBER
POSTAL APPLICATIONS ONLY

THE ACADEMY CINEMA

Oxford Street - GER 2981
presents from 17 th October

SHELLEY WINTERS ' PETER FALK

THE BALCONY

“X” (LONDON)

From the play by JEAN GENET ‘ Directed by JOSEPH STRICK